


Here I Dreamt I Was An Architect

by dfotw



Category: Inception (2010), James Bond (Craig movies), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Canon-Typical Violence, Dreamsharing, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-27
Updated: 2013-03-19
Packaged: 2017-12-03 19:27:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 24,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/701810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dfotw/pseuds/dfotw
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Q is introduced to the world of dreamsharing by M, who needs a new architect for what seems like an easy job. But what's supposed to be easy soon becomes complicated by forgers with a taste for resurrection, businessmen with surprising skills, and a secret everyone but Q seems to know.</p><p> </p><p>A Skyfall/Inception fusion.</p><p>
  <strong>COMPLETE</strong>
  <br/>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Do I dare disturb the universe?

**Author's Note:**

> Endless gratitude goes to my beta, the wonderful [Wlan](http://archiveofourown.org/users/wlan/pseuds/wlan), for her amazing feedback and having the patience to put up with me. All remaining mistakes are mine, because I can't help tinkering right up until the moment of posting.  
> The fic's title comes from The Decemberists' song of the same name. It was too good to pass up!  
> This fic uses dialogue and scenes lifted straight from the 'Inception' and 'Skyfall' screenplays; if something sounds familiar, that's why.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's title comes from T.S. Eliot's [The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock](http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html).

_I am nothing of a builder_  
 _But here I dreamt I was an architect_  
 _And I built this balustrade_  
 _To keep you home, to keep you safe_  
 _From the outside world,_  
 _But the angles and the corners,_  
 _Even though my work is unparalleled,_  
 _They never seemed to meet:_  
 _This structure fell about our feet_  
 _And we were free to go..._  
 **The Decemberists - Here I Dreamt I Was An Architect**  


The Skyfall job was a mistake from the beginning. Q knew it, Eve knew it, Tanner knew it, and Q wouldn't have been surprised if M herself knew it too. But who could say ‘no’ to M? The woman was a legend in the field and had the force of personality of a hurricane.

Back when Q still wasn’t Q anywhere but in a few select internet forums, Professor Boothroyd had asked him to stay behind after his presentation on the Architecture of Piranesi’s Carceri (a presentation of which Q was still rightfully proud). Q had thought that the elegant older woman who’d sat in the back of the room for his presentation was a visiting professor, but within five minutes of being introduced to her, he knew different.

“If you have a few moments,” Professor Boothroyd had said, “my old friend has a job offer to discuss with you.”

“A work placement?” Q had asked, more than a little proud.

“Not exactly,” M had replied with a small smile.

It took Q less than two minutes and only two tries to draw a maze she couldn’t solve.

Q had never experienced shared dreaming, but he’d heard of it; dreamsharing intersected neatly with his interests: his architecture studies, his dabbling in engineering, and the habit he had of poking his nose into government databases in his free time. But even though he frequented a heavily-secured forum of wannabe dreamers who exchanged rumours, theories and industry gossip, nothing could have prepared him for the first time he was hooked to a PASIV.

M took him to a museum. Q could have sworn he'd been there before, but most museums followed the same pattern of high-ceilinged rooms and polished wood floors, and he didn't recognise any of the paintings; he did see familiar things (those etchings of gutted machinery could only be Goya, the massive painting in the mahogany frame looked like one of Gauguin's Tahitian series except it was definitely the Brighton pier, and who knew that Henry Moore sculpted cats?), but M walked too fast for him to stop and examine them.

“They say we only use a fraction of the true potential of our brains,” said M, sidestepping a group of tourists gathered around a museum guide speaking in Japanese, “but they're talking about when we're awake. While we dream, the mind performs wonders.”

“Such as?” asked Q, always the good student.

“How do you imagine a building? You consciously create each aspect, puzzling over it in stages... but sometimes, when your imagination flies-”

“It's like I'm discovering it,” Q interrupted. It still annoyed him that he couldn’t recognise where they were; the Louvre, perhaps, or the National Gallery? It was all so familiar, and yet...

“Exactly.” M nodded tersely. “Genuine inspiration. Now, translate that to a dream, where the limitations of physics don't exist.”

They came into a small round space, lit from above; Q looked up and saw they were at the foot of a massive spiral staircase, a hundred, two hundred yards tall.

“Is this...?”

“A dream?” M asked as she stepped besides him. 

Suddenly the circle of sunlit floor shot upwards like a flying carpet, carrying them towards the sky; the staircase spiralled around them, curving down to the ground like the shell of a giant nautilus, and then they were standing on top of a dizzingly high tower.

Q threw his head back and laughed in delight; whatever reaction M seemed to be expecting, it wasn't that, because she actually turned to face him.

“I was going to tell you to calm down, but I see it's not going to be necessary.”

“It’s incredible,” said Q, barely listening to her as he walked to the edge of the platform they were. “Can I do that too? Whose dream are we on?”

He’d barely held out his hand (a gesture copied from the magician in Disney’s Fantasia, although he visualised the stairs folding down like a telescope, something out of Alice In Wonderland) when the staircase crumbled like gingerbread and they were falling.

Q woke up with a gasp, to the sympathetic eyes of M’s assistant, Ms Moneypenny, who –now he remembered- had hooked them up to the PASIV barely a minute before.

“You alright?” she asked, ready to take the cannula out of his arm.

Q met M’s gaze with wild eyes.

“Let’s do that again.”

“Five more minutes,” said M, nodding at her assistant; then, she turned to Q. “This time, you set the stage.”

Q closed his eyes, then opened them to see M looking around at the square they were on, surrounded by massive ruins of a vaguely Classical feel.

“Interesting,” M said. “You don’t need me to tell you you mustn’t build from memory.”

“Because it’s boring?” ventured Q, stepping aside to avoid being barrelled into by a person of indeterminate gender and notable leather boots.

“Amongst other things.” 

A crowd filled the square; people on their way to work, tourists looking at the ruins, elderly men milling about. 

“I’m sure you know this from your studies, but learning how to build a convincing everyday street is as important, and maybe even more difficult, than whatever Tower of Babel your imagination is coming up with.”

“I’m better at Babel than Soho,” admitted Q, “but I do have a good eye for detail.”

“So Professor Boothroyd said.”

“So, who are these people? I didn’t think there would be so many.”

“They’re projections of my subconscious,” said M primly. “You are the dreamer, I am the subject. You set the stage, but the actors are mine.”

“That’s how you get to discover people’s secrets.”

“Yes. Give them a space, and the subjects will fill it with what’s in their mind. Give them a bank, they will fill the vault with secrets. Give them a museum, they will fill the paintings on the walls.”

Oh. Q’s mind fizzled in realisation. The museum. M's museum, with Q's paintings: the Brighton of his childhood, his mother's cat, the gutted remains of a computer lying on his kitchen table...

“Give them ruins…” Q looked at a fallen obelisk, covered with ivy, at the edge of the square. It was too far away for him to read the symbols carved on its surface.

The square folded in on itself like a giant origami box, ground becoming walls, walls becoming roof, the ruins fitting in on themselves as neatly as a puzzle.

“It’s something, isn’t it?” Q said, looking around at his work; obelisks hung from the massive ceiling like stalactites.

“Yes, it is,” answered M quietly. “Now, look at the crowd.”

“They’re watching us.”

“You, actually.”

“They know what I’m doing,” Q realised. “And they don’t like it.”

“If you change too many things, too suddenly, my subconscious will realise what you’re doing and take exception.”

“And by take exception, you mean…”

A projection bumped into Q, almost knocking him down.

“You can’t control it,” he said, trying to stick close to M.

“No.”

“The only way out of a dream is dying in it,” Q added, remembering what he’d read. “By your own hand, or if one of your teammates does it for you, or…”

“Hostile projections.”

It wasn’t M who had spoken. Q whirled around to face a blond man with a wide, unpleasant smile. 

“Hello, little one.”

Q opened his mouth to speak (to ask M for help, perhaps), but instead he folded over with a groan when a knife slipped past his ribs.

He woke with a gasp, again.

“If you’re going to throw up, don’t get any on my shoes,” Ms Moneypenny warned him.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” said Q, pressing his free hand over the point on his chest where he could still feel the phantom of a bright burst of pain; Moneypenny was taking out the cannula on his other arm.

“Projections, huh?”

“Yes.” Q took a deep breath. “Got a bit too ambitious there, perhaps.”

“Happens to all of us the first few times.”

M woke up then.

“He’ll need a totem,” she said to Moneypenny, who nodded briskly.

“That’s the, um, personal object, right?” Q asked, not ready to reveal the extent of his second-hand knowledge of dreamsharing; he didn't want to be judged as a wannabe, not when the possibility of making it real was so close to hand.

M stood up and walked away without a word; Q turned to Moneypenny, who smiled at him.

“Yes. Your totem must be something small, portable, with some weight to it,” she said; her hand dug into her pocket for a bullet, which she showed him for a second before putting it away again. “Something only you know the feel and heft of. Something someone else’s dream will never be able to replicate correctly.”

Q nodded thoughtfully, going through possibilities in his mind.

“So, you’re staying?” asked Moneypenny.

Unconsciously, Q held his hand over his ribs again.

“I’d never been stabbed before,” he said wonderingly.

“Is that a ‘no’?”

He looked up to Ms Moneypenny and grinned.

“Are you joking? I could get stabbed any night coming back from the pub, but building like that? Where else could I do that?”

Moneypenny smiled right back at him.

“That’s the spirit.”

Stabbings notwithstanding, Q had been ready to sign his future onto M before Moneypenny had even helped him get the IV line out of his arm. In a few days, he ditched his shabby student clothes, invested in a business casual wardrobe with a twist, shaved every day, found a stylist who managed to bring some order to his hair, said the requisite lies to his family and friends, and dove head-first into dreamsharing without bothering to look back.

He chose his totem with the care of someone who hoped to use it for many years to come. It was an old key, one of the many trinkets he’d collected as child; he vaguely remembered his father saying it used to open his grandmother’s bridal chest, but for him it had been the key to many a pirate treasure and dungeon cell. Now he learnt the shape and weight of it in his hand, the exact sharpness of the teeth, the dink along the blade where something really heavy must have struck, the slight roughness on the inside edge the head. 

And in the meanwhile, his dreamsharing education continued at breakneck speed.

He hadn’t noticed anything wrong at first. How was he supposed to? He was drunk with the possibilities of dream architecture, busy creating impossible worlds out of nothing, and when he wasn’t dreaming, he was taking M’s PASIV apart and putting it together again, trying to come up with ways to improve it.

In the breaks between dreaming, he talked to Eve. She was nice, sharp in a way that told Q she came from a harder place than he did, but funny and willing to share stories with him while he poked at the PASIV’s innards.

“Pass me the screwdriver… no, the other one.”

“I know you think you know what you’re doing, but try not to wreck this PASIV, will you? It’s still more than your life is worth.”

Q smiled, taking the screwdriver she was offering him.

“I do know what I’m doing, trust me. It’s not that different from a computer, and you should see the things I’ve done to computers.”

“That doesn’t make me feel better, robot boy.”

“Seriously, though.” Q pulled out the PASIV’s timer and gestured at the whole gutted thing. “I thought this would be… more advanced, I don’t know. It’s still a nice piece of machinery, don’t get me wrong, but now I wish I’d paid more attention to organic chemistry. Seems like Tanner is doing most of the interesting work.”

Eve snorted a small laugh, looking at where their chemist was working on his laptop.

“You wouldn’t believe how much Bill moans about how he doesn’t get to go under often and how he wished he could do more in dreams than change the colour of his clothes.”

“I’m a glorified bartender,” Tanner replied, not looking up from his work. “A drug pusher at worst.”

“Aw, come on, don’t be daft,” said Eve. “You think I’d be a guinea pig for anyone else?” She turned back to Q. “If anyone else tries to get you to use their own Somnacin formula, run away as fast as you can.”

“If anyone, even me, tries to sell you a formula mixed with a sedative, shoot them,” Tanner added.

“Bill…” said Eve warningly.

“A sedative?” asked Q. “Why would you need a sedative?”

“If you want to go deeper than two levels, you’re going to need a sedative to keep the dream stable,” Tanner explained. “It has some unfortunate side-effects, though.”

“Bill,” said Eve again, more firmly this time.

“Like, if you are under and someone shoots you,” Tanner continued, relentlessly, “accidentally or not, you’ll end up in Limbo instead of waking up on the second level.” 

Eve walked away, her heels loud on the concrete floor of the warehouse where they were working.

“That’s what happened to your old forger, right?” asked Q after she was out of earshot.

The forums had been abuzz with rumours about what had happened three months before in Istambul; a failed attempt at inception, some had said; a lie to gild Bond’s legend, others groused. After a pause, Tanner nodded, and though the chemist was unusually chatty, Q could see that he didn’t want to share more than he’d already done.

“So, Limbo… what is it exactly?”

He learned more about Bond in bits and pieces. Tanner gave him the facts, but little else. Eve was more forthcoming, one Friday after they were done with a whole day of testing his mazes, with a bottle of tequila on the counter; Moneypenny's eyes had grown misty as she remembered how Bond had been battling a hostile projection on top of a moving train, down in the second level of a dream, when M had told her to ‘take the bloody shot’, a shot that had missed the projection entirely and sent Bond to Limbo instead. 

Q didn’t dare ask M.

Most of his training was done with Eve, the both of them going under while Tanner kept watch topside; Q graduated from one level to two in a matter of days, successfully hid a secret from Eve after three weeks, and had his projections described as ‘awkward but murderous’ within a month.

After the first time, he didn’t go under with M again. He saw her when he left the warehouse at night, plugged into the PASIV by herself, under Tanner’s watchful eyes, and she was generous enough with the advice and the answers when Eve and Q reported on his progress, but she didn’t share her dreams with the rest of the team. 

That should have been the first warning sign. But what did Q know?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Art notes:
> 
> -Q's presentation on Piranesi's _Carceri_ is based on [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlcbxAr11Pc).  
>  -The staircase in M's museum? Based on [this](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5b/Vatican_Museums_Spiral_Staircase_2012.jpg), from the Vatican Museum.  
> -Goya never drew computers, Gaugin never painted Brighton, and I don't think Henry Moore sculpted cats, not outside Q's dreams.  
> -Q's dream of ruins is [based on Piranesi](https://www.google.es/search?hl=en&site=imghp&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1366&bih=666&q=piranesi+ruins&oq=piranesi+ruins&gs_l=img.3..0i24.1217.4715.0.5020.16.11.1.4.4.0.165.1268.3j8.11.0...0.0...1ac.1.4.img.GeXQobSjLL4) too.


	2. The Arrival And The Reunion

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's title comes from Dead Can Dance's piece of the same name.

At first, Q had thought that the Skyfall job had been engineered as an opportunity for the team to test their new architect, but when Mallory outlined the situation and insisted on coming along to supervise, he realised that they were going to throw Q straight into the deep end of dreamsharing instead.

“We need a thief,” said Tanner for the fifth time, and Eve sighed, obviously near the end of her patience. They had been bickering about the best way to approach the mark for almost an hour, and they didn’t seem to be any closer to an agreement than they were at the beginning. 

M was staring out of the window, apparently not listening. 

“We don’t need a thief, we need a forger,” she said suddenly. 

Moneypenny and Tanner quieted and exchanged a look; Q sat back to watch, to try and learn where the conversational landmines were so he could avoid them in the future.

“Alec?” suggested Tanner after a moment, making a face.

Moneypenny shook her head at once.

“Shot in Ireland last month, will be out of commission for a while.”

“Who knows about the job?” M asked her pointwoman.

“The usual,” Moneypenny said with a shrug. “Mr Mallory knocked on several doors to get to us.”

Q threw a look at their client, who sat apart, looking at his Blackberry. He definitely looked like a man who wanted only the best, and Q wondered how many teams he had questioned and discarded before he settled for M and her people.

“Then, don’t worry about the forger,” M said. “He will come.”

There was only one forger who came up when talking about M, but Bond was in Limbo, so who would take his place?

Eve opened her mouth to speak, but didn’t; Tanner looked down to where he had been taking desultory notes; Q watched and waited, but no one said anything else. 

That should have been the second warning sign. 

Three days later, Q arrived fifteen minutes later than usual, clinging to a travel mug of Earl Grey like a lifeline.

“Bond is back!” Eve told him as soon as he stepped inside the warehouse.

Q looked around, but there was only him and Eve and Tanner, working on a desk in a corner.

“I thought he was dead. Or, you know, crazy,” said Q, putting down his satchel, unsure of whether it was good news or not.

“Well, he isn’t. Not dead, anyway. He’ll come by this morning. I have got to go and talk to a man about a gun, so show him what you can do, will you?”

Three months. Three months was the grace period they gave those who’d fallen into Limbo. Three months unresponsive on a hospital bed, brains turned to scrambled egg, and then whatever colleague was at hand signed the admission to some private asylum, pulled the plug (or pulled the trigger), and that was that. It was what Eve and Tanner had told Q, and that was on what he had been basing all his assumptions about their old forger.

Except now Bond was back. Strolling into the warehouse as if he owned it, nodding in passing to Tanner, his spotless suit only highlighting his reddened eyes and grim face; he was less handsome than Q had imagined him, and definitely less dead.

Q bristled under the dismissive look Bond gave him after he finished his tour of the warehouse.

“Where’s Moneypenny?” he asked, his voice hoarse.

“Went to see a man about a gun,” Q replied, unspooling two leads from the PASIV. “She wanted me to show you something.”

Bond barely raised an eyebrow.

“I’m your new architect,” Q felt compelled to add.

“You must be joking.”

“Why? Because I’m not some stodgy university professor?”

“Because you still have spots.”

“My complexion is hardly relevant,” Q said pleasantly, while seething inside; jokes about his age had stopped being funny ten years before.

“Your competence is.”

“Age is no guarantee of efficiency,” replied Q, wondering if he could punch Bond without breaking his hand. Only the risk of not being able to sketch for days stopped him from making an attempt; well, that and that he didn't want to let the forger know how much his attitude irked Q.

“And youth is no guarantee of innovation.”

“I’ll wager I can create a better dream in my pajamas, in the five minutes before my first cup of Earl Grey, than you can do if we kept you hooked to a PASIV for a year,” Q informed him.

“So why do you need me?” Bond asked, but he didn’t sound offended.

“Every now and then, one needs a thief.”

“A thief, am I? I guess that’s one thing you can’t do in your pajamas.”

Q held back a smile and waited.

“Alright,” Bond relented after a moment. “Show me what you can do.”

The forger checked the PASIV before taking a seat and hooking himself up, and he watched Q as he did the same; the younger man was glad that all these months had given him enough practice that he could put himself under in his sleep (heh!), because being the focus of Bond's attention was extremely unnerving.

“Three minutes,” he announced as he set the timer and reclined on his chair.

“You think you need less than five minutes to impress me?”

“Sweet dreams, Mr Bond.”

Of course Q wanted to impress the legendary James Bond; of course he wanted to show him his Babel Tower, his Piranesi-inspired Grand Piazza, the water labyrinth with the moving water currents that had made him win a bet against Eve. But Q knew enough to be prudent, particularly with a stranger populating his dream, so when he opened his eyes, they were standing in a starkly monochromatic landscape, the wind carrying the smell of the sea.

A few massive cranes swung containers around, piling them into stacks as tall as buildings, but otherwise the docks were deserted, all grey stone, grey metal and the grey sky above them.

Bond looked around with some apprehension, but Q had the pleasure of seeing him relax minutely when he realised the dream wasn't about to collapse on their ears; he relaxed, too, when he didn't see any projections, not eager to experience what Tanner had described as 'Terminators in fancy suits'. He started to walk towards one of the piers and Bond followed; the air in the shadow of the massive crates was cold, but Q was wearing a good parka.

“The docks,” the forger said, giving another look to the piles of crates they were leaving behind, and to the row of sad buildings with dusty windows in the distance. “Not exactly Christmas, is it?”

“Were you expecting Venice during the Carnivale so you could shoot your way through it?” Q enquired, remembering one of the anecdotes Eve had told him. “We don't really go in for that any more.”

He walked faster, confident that Bond would keep up; when he came to the end of the pier, he stopped and rested his elbows on the balustrade. In the distance, a massive warship caught a few stray rays of sunshine; the tugboat in front of it stayed in the shadows, ugly as a beetle.

“It always makes me feel a little melancholy,” Q said, knowing that Bond was right behind him. “Grand old warship, irreparably damaged, being ignominiously hauled away for scrap. The inevitability of time, don't you think?” Bond didn't answer; Q bit his lip not to smile at finding himself quoting from one of his first-year essays on Turner. “What do you see?”

“A bloody big ship. Excuse me,” said Bond shortly, and turned to leave.

“Bond,” said Q, not moving.

The forger didn't answer. Q turned and finally allowed himself a small smile: in front of them, between the pier and the docks themselves, stood a massive maze of tall crates; the dockyard cranes were working busily at them, moving the crates around, creating and destroying passages constantly: a maze in constant state of flux. Honestly, Q was pretty proud of himself.

Bond gave him an appraising look.

“Can you find your way through it, though?” the forger asked.

Q didn't let his smile waver.

“Can you?” he asked in return, and began to walk back down the pier.

He reached the crate maze first (he suspected that Bond had let him, hanging back to watch what would happen) and walked through the space between two containers; before the forger could follow him, a crate was slotted there, neatly blocking the passage.

“Good luck trying to make your way through” called Q, and brought out a gun from under his jacket, keeping an eye out for projections; shooting was easier in dreams, particularly when he was the dreamer, physics helping him along in a way they would not in the real world. “Please try not to break everything in your path!”

The automated cranes were under his control and he had the evolving schematics of the maze in his head; Q knew where to turn, when a passage was going to be blocked and when it was going to be open, where the dead-ends were that would see him crushed under a crate or pushed into the choppy waters. Still, he moved carefully, gun at the ready.

It took almost ten minutes before he heard the first explosion behind him. Eve had warned him about Bond's tendency to cause general destruction, so Q had been careful to fill the crates with vast quantities of superglue and delicate glass vases. Let Bond try to shoot his way out of that, he thought, ducking under a swinging crate and finding himself on the docks on the other side of the maze.

He dreamed up a bench to sit down and wait (rugged stone cold and a bit wet under his woollen trousers, reassuringly solid) and breathed in the smell of salt water, engine oil and rusty metal; Eve had praised the solidity of his dreams, the detail of the textures and materials, but scolded him for not taking as much care with smell and sound, so Q had been working on that in his latest dreams. 

Behind him, two projections stood, leaning against a wall, keeping him in their sight; they were well-dressed, with wide shoulders and rugged, forgettable faces. Q didn't need to look at them twice to know they were armed and, should he take one too many liberties with the dream, they'd be on him before he could draw his own weapon, so he just sat and waited.

Twenty minutes later, a gangly figure leaped from the top of a crate onto the pavement in front of him. It wasn't Bond or, at least, not exactly. Q had the privilege of seeing himself as he would look after fighting his way through the maze instead of outsmarting it: windblown hair, ruined woollen trousers, broken glasses, and blood seeping from his shoulder and staining his designer cardigan. The battered Q raised his eyebrow at him, and Q returned the gesture with a little more condescension than usual, because Bond's forge was a little smaller, a little more fragile, a little younger than what Q saw in the mirror most mornings.

“Still think I need more than five minutes?” he asked the forger as Bond shifted back into his own form and sat down on the bench besides him.

Bond didn't have time to reply before Q opened his eyes to find Eve perched in a desk, watching them.

“So?” she asked as they took the cannulas from their arms. “Q, you don't look as if you've just been stabbed in the throat with a fork, that's already better than what happened to me the first time I went under with Bond.”

“Says the woman who sent me to Limbo,” said Bond, smirking at Moneypenny; Q watched the flash of silver in his hands, but he couldn't catch a good look at the forger's totem.

Wait, were they joking about Limbo? Q caught the tail of a shadow in Eve's eyes, but she raised her chin and smirked right back at Bond.

“That should teach you to stand still when someone's shooting at you.”

Bond smiled and shook his head, turning away from her.

“Q,” he said simply, offering him his hand.

“Mr Bond.” Q shook the hand of one of dreamsharing's brightest and tried not to smile too hard.


	3. Time To Murder And Create

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's title come from T.S. Eliot's [The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock](http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html).

With Bond's arrival, everything seemed to move a little faster. He was surly and sarcastic and drank too much (apparently, Tanner knew to adjust Bond's Somnacin dose to his blood alcohol level), but he also had a good grasp on strategic thinking and absolutely no compunction to use it.

The mark was a woman only known as Sèverine, a high-class escort who had come into possession of certain information from the late Macau Chief of Police; the man had been killed in an explosion that had also destroyed his laptop and safe, so it was reasonable to suppose that the information now only existed in Séverine’s mind.

“Problem is, she's probably the most valuable escort at the Fortuna,” explained Eve, as she handed out files to all the team, “so not only does she have pretty solid protection...”

“The Fortuna has a dream den,” said Tanner in a tone of bleak realisation.

“Exactly.” Eve looked annoyed. “It's more than likely that she has experienced shared dreaming before, either recreationally or as a punishment.”

“One level isn't going to be enough,” concluded M.

“No. If we put her under forcefully and she realises, she'll know enough to wake herself up.”

“So, two levels.” Bond sounded unconcerned. “One level to make her comfortable enough to go under voluntarily, the second to remind her of Chang and hopefully of the data we need.”

“If she has been in the Fortuna's dream den before, then our best bet is to make the first level just that. Eve, Q will need the floor plan for the Fortuna,” said M. “In fact, Q, once you have the design locked, you’ll need to visit the place to get the details correct, there’s only so much you can do from photographs. I will not have this job fail because you didn’t get the texture of the curtains right.” Q nodded. “Bond, you will need to prepare a forge of Madame Lu, the floor manager of the Fortuna. She is the one who deals with the house escorts and someone Sèverine will be likely to listen to. Would you prefer to visit as a client, or get a job there?”

“Client,” answered Bond immediately.

“Why do I bother asking?” sighed M. “We'll travel to Macau in two weeks, so start working on the fake passports and permits too.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

M gave Bond a sour look.

“What about the second level?” asked Q; he didn’t want to show his inexperience asking endless questions, but he’d learnt it was a good idea to get the team discussing things out loud.

“We need something that will remind Sèverine of the late Mr Chang and of the things she saw while she was with him.” M got up from her seat, went to look out of the window. “She probably didn’t give much thought to the information when she saw it, and she likely doesn’t remember everything when she’s awake, so we’ll need something that will jog her memory.”

“If what Mallory's sources say it's true and she has the habit of going through her clients' laptop, then the easiest thing is to give her a laptop and let her fill it up,” said Bond. “Somewhere that reminds her of him.”

“She last had a chance to get at Chang’s laptop when he took her on a trip to Shanghai, so…” Eve clicked on her pen.

“Let’s get her lost in Shanghai, then,” Bond proposed. “Drop her in the middle of town, at night, raining, let her know that she needs to find Chang at once. If we keep the environment hostile enough that she gets disoriented and then we give her a laptop, her mind will fill it with the information we need.”

“That could work,” admitted M.

“Q, how are your cityscapes?” asked Bond, smirking at him.

“Fine,” Q nodded, not bothering to rise to the forger’s bait. “I’ve never been to Shanghai, but I did some work on the metro for my master’s degree a couple of years ago. If we need somewhere to get her lost, an interchange station is a great place for that. I can do a series of looped platforms to get her going in circles, that should minimise the space we have to cover and reduce the amount of projections she can bring in.”

“That sounds fantastic,” said Eve; Q was gratified to see that Bond had stopped smirking and was looking at him what reluctant admiration.

“We have a problem,” said Tanner then. He was looking at the file on Sèverine they had been given, highlighter in hand. “I’m looking at her blood tests… very professional of the Fortuna to have them done monthly, by the way… and her levels of SNRIs are much too high. She’s on some kind of anxiety medication, probably a cocktail of them.”

“What does that mean to us?” asked M.

“Serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors don’t mix particularly well with some of the components of Somnacin, particularly the ones that make the dream stable. Basically, she’s going to be at a risk of waking early if something in the dream startles her.”

M pursed her lips.

“We use a sedative, then.”

Q looked up, remembering Tanner’s warning. The chemist’s face settled into a mulish expression.

“If we use a sedative,” said Tanner, leaning back on his chair to address Mallory, who had been watching the meeting in silence, sitting a little apart from the team, “we cannot wake by dying in the dream. Dying in the dream will just send us to a deeper level and there’s no waking up from that one.”

Q felt uneasy at Tanner’s insistence that everyone knew of the dangers of sedatives, but Mallory simply nodded.

“I assume you have other ways to wake us up,” he said, very much not a question.

“Of course, we can organise a kick from the second to the first level, and from the first level to reality,” answered M at once. “Or we can wait until the Somnacin dose wears off and we wake naturally. No dying necessary.”

“But…” said Q, the memory of his first dream very present. “Accidents can happen. Hostile projections can happen.”

“We’ll just have to make sure they don’t happen this time,” said M, her tone final. “It’s a two-level extraction, yes, but the mark isn’t militarised, and if we’re careful, she’ll never notice we’re there.”

Q was unconvinced; he looked at Eve (studiously taking notes), at Tanner (biting the cap of his highlighter), at Bond (staring at M with an unreadable expression on his face) and finally at Mallory. It was the client’s decision, in the end; he bet M would have preferred to take it on her own, but since Tanner had involved Mallory, it was down to him.

At last, the man nodded. 

“I trust your judgement,” he said to M, and it didn’t sound as complimentary as it should.

***

Later, Q was watching over Mallory and Eve as they dreamed, trying to get the businessman enough practice that he wouldn’t hold them back during the job. M had stalked off after the meeting, Tanner was working on his laptop, muttering unhappily to himself, and Bond...

“Do you play poker?” Bond asked Q, coming up to him with a pack of cards.

“A little,” Q answered, looking up from his sketchbook; he’d need to travel to Shanghai before they went to Macau, but he had floor plans for the Central Station to start working from. “Why?”

“You’ll need the practice, if we’re to visit the Fortuna together,” Bond said, pulling a chair close and shuffling the cards expertly. “You’ll need a tux, too.”

“I’ll take your help with the poker,” Q decided generously, putting his sketchbook away.

“You don’t want me to take you shopping for a tux?” Bond asked, opening two bags of M&Ms to use as chips.

Q gave the forger an unfavourable look and took the deck to shuffle it himself for a bit; he didn’t need Eve’s warnings to know Bond would cheat all he could.

“No offence, Mr Bond, but your taste in clothing is a little old-fashioned.”

Bond pointedly looked at Q’s cardigan as Q spread the cards facedown on the table and gestured for him to choose one (Bond got an ace, of course, and picked back the deck with a smirk).

“Grand old warship, huh?” Bond smiled crookedly, and Q smiled back, flattered that the forger had bothered to remember his words. “Suit yourself.”

“Now that was just awful,” Q said, taking his cards and wrinkling his nose at the pun; Bond smiled wider for a fleeting moment, then turned his attention to his own cards.

They played mostly in silence for about ten minutes before Q decided to speak.

“You don’t mind, then?” he asked quietly, not looking up from his cards.

“Mind what?” asked Bond in the same tone.

“Going under with a sedative, after what happened the last time.”

“I don’t think Moneypenny will shoot me again.”

Q gave him a quick look and met Bond’s eyes.

“Are you afraid?” asked the forger.

“Hm, no. Check,” answered Q. “I’m cautious. Don’t want to end up braindead on my first job, that’s all.”

“Prudent.” Bond added three peanut M&Ms to the pile in front of him. “We’ll be careful.”

“Yes,” said Q. “We will. Raise you double." 

Bond won, of course. Q knew the forger was cheating even if he couldn't see how, but he figured that practising how to lose gracefully was going to come in handy for when he had to visit the Fortuna. So, they played again. And again, when Q was tired of working on his plans and Bond was tired of working on their fake passports, and when one of them was watching over other members of the team dreaming, and once in a dream, waiting for the timer to run out in the brightly-lit carriage of a train running through endless dark tunnels.

“You can learn a lot from watching other people's projections,” said the woman one seat away from Q, holding her cards against her cleavage; she was wearing a form-fitting cocktail dress, sequins shining under the train's fluorescent lights. “Like those teenagers at the end of the train, with their Doc Martens and their terrible sense of style.”

“I imagine you can also learn a lot from seeing what shape people's forges take,” Q replied, putting three more M&Ms on his pile in the empty seat between them.

“Maybe,” and now it was the rumbly voice of a tall man, dark hair going grey on his temples, with narrow, cat-like eyes and a straight nose.

Q only noticed he'd been staring too long when the man flashed him a knowing smile of perfect white teeth.

“You can learn a lot from seeing what catches people's eyes, too,” the man said, returning the attention to the cards in his hand.

“A regular observer of human nature you are, Bond,” Q said archly, willing himself not to blush.

The forger gave him a self-satisfied grin, back in his own form (short, older, craggier than the dark-haired stranger Q had admired).

“Great, now you've alerted the projections,” Q sighed, putting down his cards as he saw the teenagers on the end of the wagon turn to stare at him with open hostility.

“Give me a kiss,” said Bond, sliding into the empty seat between them, cards and M&Ms scattering to the floor.

“What?”

Bond was already leaning in, pressing his lips to Q's. After one second of surprise, Q drew back and glared at the forger.

“What is that supposed to achieve? They're still staring.”

“It was worth a shot,” Bond said with a placid shrug.

“Worth a shot, is it?” 

Q enjoyed the split second of surprise in Bond's eyes as he took out a slim gun from under his cardigan and put a bullet straight through the forger's head.

“Hostile projections,” Q said to Moneypenny, who was watching over their dreaming, when she asked why they were awake two minutes before schedule. 

“Q shot me,” Bond informed her, managing to sound a kicked puppy even though his face was impassive. “He's obviously been spending too much time with you.”

“That will teach you,” said Eve, holding out her hand for Q to give her a high-five. “So, how is the level coming along?”

“I guess you can teach an old dog new tricks,” sighed Q, as if it pained him to admit it. “Bond is starting to get the hang of trains.”

Q smiled blandly as the forger glared, and was rewarded by an almost invisible smile (left corner of Bond's mouth quirking up, his craggy face wrinkling like paper under an impatient hand). 

In short conversations held over their cards, or over Q's plans and Bond's fake passports, the forger revealed bits of his history, like how he'd met M and been introduced to dreamsharing in his years in the military; he'd been a point man then, forgery in dreams not yet having been discovered. There was a gap in his stories of what Q judged to be a few years, and then it was all tales of M and the rest of the team, of extraction jobs gone right and wrong, of Bond's improbably escapes and even more improbable disguises. Bond wasn't so surly when he had a glass of scotch, a pile of M&Ms, and a deck of cards; he liked needling Q about his age, his clothes, or his taste in dream paradoxes, and when Q answered quip for quip, never backing down, Bond looked at him as if he was something new and interesting.

“Stop lying to Q, you're not going to impress him,” said Eve, smacking Bond lightly on the top of the head with a file. 

“I don't need to lie to impress him, do I, Q?”

“What you need to do is to finish my fake passport, preferably without any spelling errors this time,” Q replied primly. “Are those my travel plans, Eve?”

“Yes. You'll be posing as the owner of a software start-up,” she said, handing him the file. “You already have the whole hipster thing going on, and you can talk about computers a bit if anyone asks you.”

“Hm.” Q dutifully opened the file; he wondered if Eve knew how close he'd come to being a hacker instead of an architect, to ditching Uni in his first year to dedicate himself to a life of internet crime. “I get to go to Shanghai before I hit Macau, right?”

“Yes, yes, I've scheduled three days for you to soak in the local atmosphere and get lost in the metro.”

“I'm an architect, I don't get lost,” Q informed her.

“We'll see that in the dream, robot boy.” Eve turned to Bond. “Now, you. You are going to Shanghai too. M doesn't want you hanging around the Fortuna too long, I have no idea why.”

Bond looked pleased that their extractor didn't trust him around their mark, or maybe pleased to go to Shanghai, Q couldn't tell and didn't have time to ponder; he needed to go and sweet-talk Tanner into providing him with tranquillisers.


	4. Shanghai - To Lead You To An Overwhelming Question

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's title comes from T.S. Eliot's [The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock](http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html).

“I don't like flying.”

“You've said that before. Five times, if I counted correctly.”

“It still stands true. I have just enough engineering training to know exactly how many things could go wrong with a plane.”

“It's going to be fine.”

Eve had booked them separate flights, of course, but Bond had appeared by Q's business class seat shortly before take-off and had charmed the businesswoman who had been sitting by Q’s side into changing places.

So, Q felt completely justified in ranting about his (very logical, thank you very much) fear of flying to his travelling companion.

“You've taken enough pills to put down a horse, relax.”

Q gripped the armrests. There was nothing worse than someone telling him to relax to get him to actually relax. He wondered if he could let go of the armrests long enough to punch Bond in the face; he was sure it would make him feel slightly better.

“Eve is going to have kittens when she finds out you took this plane,” he said instead. “There is a point in keeping our distance before we get there, you know?”

“She won't find out. The paper trail is still just as she made it.”

“Then how did you...? Never mind, I don't want to know.”

“It was a last-minute decision. You looked ready to bite your own fingers off in the waiting room.”

“I really don't like flying,” sighed Q, and closed his eyes as the plane began to make its way to the runway.

Bond chuckled.

“Sleep it off. I'll keep an eye on the PASIV.”

“Oh, so that's why.” Q thought about opening his eyes, but the plane shuddered a little and he decided against it. “I'm handcuffed to it, you know? You should, because you made up all the paperwork for me to be allowed to bring it onto the plane with me. And even medicated, I know better than to just leave it for someone to steal. For one, Eve would sell my organs in the black market to get the funds to recover it.”

“That she would. But two pairs of eyes are better than one, and now you can stop trying to dig your fingers into the armrest. I'm here. I survived a plane crash once, odds are good I'll survive another one.”

“Probability doesn't work like that,” muttered Q, then gritted his teeth as he felt the swooping sensation in his stomach that indicated the plane had taken off.

“Pretend it's a dream,” suggested Bond after a minute or two. “Would that help? You don't seem to have vertigo in dreams.”

“This isn't about vertigo. This is... forget it. Go flirt with the stewardess or something.”

“And leave you here to your misery? Never.” Q heard the sound of a magazine opening. “Sleep, pass out, do what you will. I will keep watch.”

“We're on a plane. No one is going to rob me on a plane.”

“You'd be surprised.”

“Fine.” Q gripped the handle of the PASIV case more tightly, felt the cold of the handcuff on the skin of his wrist, breathed out.

He fell asleep to the sound of Bond's pen scratching in the answers of a crossword. He awoke with a start as the plane shuddered.

“Small turbulence over the Urals. Still six hours to go,” said Bond.

The plane was dark, with only a few lights here and there and the glare of a couple of laptops marking the insomniacs. Q ran his free hand over his face and felt for the PASIV case; still there, still the correct weight.

“Ugh,” said Q feelingly. “Water?”

“Here.” Bond passed him a sealed plastic bottle, then smirked. “If I thought your hair was a sight before...”

“Don't,” said Q as authoritatively as he could when he felt his skull was stuffed with candy floss. 

“Do you want to get up, walk around a little?”

The plane shook slightly. Q spilled some water as he tried to grip the armrest without letting go of the water bottle.

“Maybe not,” Bond continued seamlessly. “Think you can go to sleep again?”

Q searched in his pocket for the pills Tanner had given him before he'd left the warehouse the day before. He hadn't wanted to take them, not trusting himself with a strange drug, on his own and carrying the PASIV, but since Bond was there, he felt he could take the chance.

“Wake me up when we get there.”

“Sweet dreams, Q.”

Q was going to marry Tanner for free access to those pills, he decided on the taxi taking him from Shanghai Pudong to his hotel. Not only had he slept the six hours through, but after Bond woke him up, Q had only needed to drink a bottle of water to feel like himself again, enough that he could insist that they follow Eve's security protocols and made their separate way to their hotel.

In all his life as an architecture student, Q had never been set foot in a five star hotel as a guest, and he tried not to look out of place as he stepped into the lobby of the Pudong Shangri-La. He didn’t need to be Bond to play the part of a jet-lagged young businessman, and once he’d had a shower, changed his clothes, and secured the PASIV to the hotel safe in such a way that any potential thieves would have to demolish three walls to get to it, he decided to go out for a walk.

He opened the door to find Bond standing there.

“Subtlety is not exactly your strong suit, is it, Mr Bond?” he asked, checking there was no one else in the corridor. “What is it? Did you want to use the PASIV?”

“You’re going out to eat something?” Bond asked in return. “I’ll go with you. You don’t know Shanghai and it wouldn’t do for our architect to get lost.”

“I’m an architect,” Q said peevishly. “I don’t get lost.”

And he didn’t, in spite of Bond’s and the Shanghai Metro’s best efforts. He navigated the crowds easily, recognising the ebbs and flows of people as predicted by the design of the streets and metro stations, sometimes following, sometimes anticipating the maps he had memorised, ignoring Bond’s grumbled complaints and half-hearted suggestions.

“Welcome to rush hour on the metro,” he’d said to Bond as the man shouldered his way through the crowd to catch up with Q; he obviously didn’t know how to slither his way around the rushing mass of people. “Not something you’d know much about, I take it?”

“How about we go and get dinner?” Bond said, glaring at a businesswoman who smacked him with her purse as she rushed by.

“Fine,” Q said magnanimously. “Your treat?”

Bond tried to convince Q to go to the Pudong branch of the Ming Xuan, but Q put his foot down and insisted they get ‘some real food, Bond, in a place for real people’, so they ended up having dim sum and crab-stuffed buns in a tiny, crowded restaurant in a low-lit side street. Bond ordered in what seemed to Q flawless Mandarin, and Q ate and tried to memorise the background noise of conversations for use in a future dream, not paying much attention to the story Bond was telling him about Tanner trying some of his compounds on Moneypenny.

“M was an architect, wasn’t she?” Q asked, near the end of the dinner, when Bond had let his stories peter out.

“Yes,” Bond answered, a little surprised. “But you knew that already, didn’t you? She has been training you, after all.”

“Hm. I read her theses, both of them, and she had some really good papers published in the Seventies.” Q didn’t mention that it was Eve who took the brunt of his training. “She’s brilliant. Why did she stop building? Why does she need me for this job?”

Bond gave him a long look, his expression flat in a way that Q had come to recognise as guardedness.

“She’s an extractor now,” the forger answered, shrugging slightly and gesturing for the waitress to bring them the check. “Multitasking is possible, but it can lead to distraction.”

“Hm,” said Q again; Bond was lying, like Eve had lied when he’d asked her about it during his first week. A cold shiver of unease skittered down his back, and he stood up straighter. “We'd better go to the hotel now and try to get some sleep. It won’t do for us to add jet-lag to the effects of the Somnacin.”

“You slept all through the flight, are you sure you’re going to be able to sleep now?”

“I wouldn’t call what I did on the plane ‘sleeping’,” Q answered, leaving Bond to settle the bill. “Come on, I’ll let you get us a taxi this time.”

Q didn’t sleep. He firmly directed Bond away to his own room -ignoring the offers to get a drink or go for a late-night swim-, then sat on his bed and opened his laptop (his old one, bought and modified before his introduction to dreamsharing). He’d lost practice, spending too much time sketching plans and too little on the computer, but it didn’t take him too long to get into the database he was looking for, because the British Army really needed to upgrade their security.

He’d ran a cursory background check on the members of the team when he’d signed up for it, of course, but he’d been too awed by M to really dig into her past, other than her theses and her published papers. Now, he tried harder.

And failed.

Someone -someone very, very good- had wiped M’s past clean, at least the part that tied her to the military. There was nothing to find there, no traces of her work, no leads to follow. Q tried the official databases, the unofficial ones, everything he could get his hands on without triggering any alarms, and he found nothing. It was a job done much better than what Eve could do, or Bond, or Q himself.

Interesting. And not necessarily in a good way.

Bond knocked on his door at eight o'clock, and opened it right away, somehow bypassing the electronic lock. Q was still awake, laptop, plans and notes spread all over the luxurious, unappreciated bed.

“I thought you'd wanted to sleep,” Bond said, giving one look around the room.

“Hm,” replied Q, looking up slowly from his work. “I got distracted.”

“So I see.” Bond closed the door behind him. “Do you want to have breakfast, or do you need any help?”

“I don't think you can help.”

“Try me,” Bond purred, but the offer sounded genuine.

Q told himself not to smile, and not to ask what was really on his mind; the evening before Bond had proved that his loyalties were with M first (as they should be).

“I'm having some issues with the looping in the service tunnels for the second level,” he said instead.

“Issues? What issues?”

“Stuff,” said Q vaguely, too tired to go into details with someone who wouldn't understand anyway.

“Oh well, if it's just 'stuff', surely someone who has been dreaming since you were in primary school won't be of much use to help you solve it.”

“Thank you for your contribution, Mr Bond,” Q said peevishly, taking off his glasses to rub the exhaustion from his eyes.

“Forgive me for wanting a little specificity, Q,” the forger replied in a similar tone.

Q slipped his glasses on again and gave Bond a dubious look.

“Specificity,” the man repeated. “Some of us are able to use high-value Scrabble words too.”

“Twenty-three points isn't very high,” said Q, and he was sure his smile could be heard on his voice. “Are you counting on stumbling on a triple-value-word cell?”

“Actually, I was counting on having a Q,” Bond replied, and laughed at Q’s incredulous expression.

Q groaned, and covered his face with his hands not to show Bond how his laugh made Q smile.

“That was awful,” he decreed. “For that line alone, I should make the next dream collapse on your head, but your knowledge of Scrabble will save you this time.”

“Only this time?”

“If you want to start building some credit for the next time, take me to have some breakfast. We can talk about the service tunnels over coffee.”

But in spite of the laughter and Bond's surprising insights into tunnel architecture, Q couldn't relax. The unease that had started surrounding the job made him cautious, forced him to keep his distance, made him dismiss Bond's flirtation and deflect the forger's questions.

The next two days, Q managed to avoid Bond almost completely. He spent the days outside, roaming the metro and the streets, soaking in the atmosphere (the distinct sound of the metro engines approaching, the smells of street food vendors and the most common perfumes, the shapes of the street signs, the texture of the wall tiles in the interchange tunnels), and the nights were spent alternating PASIV practice with Bond. Q insisted that they couldn’t afford to both be hooked up to the PASIV at the same time with no one trustworthy to watch over them, and since it fed right into the forger’s own paranoia, Bond accepted it without (much) complaint.

This afforded Q plenty of time to think, to examine his suspicions and weigh the evidence he had (and, most importantly, the evidence he couldn't seem to find). A hundred times he considered returning to his old life, to build according to the laws of physics, and a hundred times he dismissed the idea.

He watched Bond dreaming and the urge to stay became a certainty.


	5. Macau - Into The Corners Of The Evening

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's title comes from T.S. Eliot's [The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock](http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html).

In Macau, Eve had rented office space for the team, and booked rooms in five different hotels, all within walking distance but far enough to meet her stringent security requirements. Q checked in, had a shower, then made his way to their shared space, PASIV in hand; he was just in time to see M leave, giving him a quick nod that couldn’t hide the dark bags under her eyes.

“Everything OK?” he asked Eve, setting the PASIV on a clear table.

“Fine,” she said, barely looking up from her laptop. “Finishing the details to catch the mark at her monthly Botox session. How was Shanghai?”

“Busy,” said Q, deliberately vague. “I have the second level almost finished, though. Have we decided who is going to be the dreamer?”

“For the second level, Bond, probably. I’ll be the dreamer for the first and stay there, in case there’s a need for an early kick.”

No mention of M, Q noticed.

“Am I going to be there at all?” he asked. “You don’t need me once I’ve taught you and Bond the layouts, right?”

Eve paused in her typing, then looked up with a teasing smile.

“Getting cold feet, robot boy? Tanner is going to stay topside. You can come, it’ll be good practice.”

Q returned her smile as well as he could.

“Of course,” he said.

“Did you in the end let Bond drag you to get a tux to suit his standards? You are scheduled to visit the Fortuna this evening for reconnaissance, remember?”

“I wouldn’t be caught dead in a suit Bond approved of,” said Q, faking a small shudder to make Eve laugh. “A friend in London gave me a hand, I'm now the proud owner of a Dries Van Noten.”

“Mmmm, I look forwards to seeing that.” Eve returned to her typing.

“You’re coming too?”

“Someone has to make sure Bond doesn’t get caught passing misspelled chips,” she said, as if it was something that happened all the time, “and you and I will both look less conspicuous if we come in together. Let me finish this and then you can show me what you have of the first level. I still can’t get the staircase quite right.”

“Don’t forget about the curtains, too.”

“The bloody curtains,” sighed Eve feelingly.

Q picked up Eve at her hotel that evening and complimented her on her sensationally well-constructed gown (the bodice reminded him of a staircase, one of those wide, softly curved outdoor ones that were built to be as much of a meeting place as a way to get from lower to upper ground); in return, she gave him a smile and an obvious once-over.

“Nice tux,” she said, wrinkling her nose just a little. “Bond is going to hate it.”

“I'm counting on it.”

The curtains were, in fact, one of the few things Q noticed when they finally made it into the Fortuna, arriving in a frankly unnecessary gondola. The casino was low-lit, except for the playing tables, but once Q looked past the gilded wood and the komodo dragon pit, he recognised it for what it was: a small fortress, easily defended from outside forces, but designed equally efficiently for crowd control on the inside. Three exits, too many columns, and lots of blind spots, except from an alcove where some sombrely suited men from security were watching the proceedings.

Eve walked away with the excuse of 'having a little flutter', so Q strolled around, adjusting the plans in his head to the reality of creaking wooden floors, the smell of cigarette smoke and wood wax, and the damned curtains, rough to the touch. 

“Leave me to look at the curtains, and watch out for Bond's big entrance,” Eve told him, passing by his side.

While he waited, Q strolled around, pretending to hesitate over which table to join, but actually keeping an eye on the staircase. They had agreed that actually requesting admittance to the Fortuna's dream-den was too likely to get them noticed, but Q decided that as soon as Bond showed up, he would leave the forger on his own and make his way to the bar on the upper level to see if he could snoop around a little bit. 

However, when Bond walked in with the air of one who is used to high-stakes games in expensive casinos all over the world, Q waited a little while more, wending his way slowly around the tables; he knew that startling the forger wasn't a good idea, so he made sure to pass through the man's line of sight before coming stand behind Bond, who was pretending to pay attention to his cards and the chips in his hand.

“Rub them together all you like, they're not going to breed,” Q murmured, barely moving his lips.

“You never know,” replied Bond in a similar tone of voice, looking up from the table only briefly. And then, “Are you sure that's a tux?” 

“Welcome to the 21st century, Mr Bond,” Q replied in a murmur, hiding a smile as best as he could. “Oh, and get Moneypenny to check those chips in your pocket before you try cashing them in.”

He walked away then, feeling Bond's attention on him as he went up the stairs.

“Radios,” Q muttered to himself as he slid onto a stool. “How hard can it be to dream up radios?”

“Sir?” asked the bartender.

“Vodka, neat,” he requested.

While he waited for his drink, he turned to look around and caught Eve's eye as she sipped at a champagne flute on a small table; discreetly, she gestured to her right. Q followed her gaze to where a beautiful woman in a splendid backless dress was watching the crowd and smoking; their mark was as lovely in person as she was in the files Q had studied, and the suited bodyguards behind her confirmed she was also as well-protected. Q retrieved his drink and went to lean on the balustrade, following Sèverine's gaze to see what had caught her attention.

Of course, Bond was making a spectacle of himself, flirting up a storm with an older woman in an elegant velvet gown, attempting to get her to dance with him between the card tables.

“Madam Lu, I assume?” Q asked when Moneypenny stopped by his side.

“Subtlety has never been Bond's strong suit. However, since everyone is distracted... the door to the dream den is the third one on the right along that corridor.”

“After you, Miss Moneypenny.”

They managed a good three minutes inside the low-ceilinged room where the Fortuna stashed five sofas, one old-fashioned PASIV, and only three occupants: a businessman in an expensive wrinkled suit -obviously the client-, a pale woman with the sickly look of a professional dreamer, and an old man who was watching over them and who Eve distracted with giggly flirtation.

By the time they returned to the bar, Bond's diversion had dissolved... or rather, escalated to the point that, as Q and Eve went down the stairs, Bond was coming up, Madame Lu on his arm.

“Like I said, subtle he is not,” sighed Eve once they were on the main floor. 

“Is that even a good idea?” asked Q, telling himself he wasn't jealous at all.

“He'll be fine,” said Eve dismissively. “Buy me a drink?”

“Of course.” Q led Eve to a smaller bar past the playing tables and ordered two glasses of champagne. “So...”

“Whatever you're dying to ask, ask it already.”

“It's about M.”

Eve gave him a quick look; with a resigned shrug, she gestured Q to follow her to a secluded table.

“Is there a problem?” she asked as soon as they were settled.

“You know there is,” Q replied.

Eve looked away.

“It's under control,” she said, looking at the crowd. “That's why you're here. As long as you do the building, it's going to be fine.”

“What is it exactly that's wrong?”

Eve took a sip of her champagne.

“I don't know if you've noticed,” she said, “but everyone else on the team is much younger than M.”

“She was one of the pioneers of the field, I know.”

“Exactly. You've been with us for a couple of months, robot boy. I've worked with her for under a year. Tanner has been with her longer, but not much. Even Bond, who you'd think was her son by how he treats her, has only been her forger for five years.”

“You don't know either,” realised Q with some dismay.

Eve shrugged.

“I know enough. It's not a problem in most jobs, as long as M doesn't know the layouts beforehand, and even if something happens, Bond can take care of it. Really, it's fine.”

It was a meagre reassurance, but the other option was walking away, and Q couldn't bring himself to do that.

Still, he considered quitting when -in spite of his texture-perfect recreation of the Fortuna, and the elegant efficiency of his Shanghai metro station-, the thing that finally earned Q some praise from M was his idea that they used radios in the dream.

“Think of the sleekest, fanciest mini-radios you've seen in whatever ridiculous spy films you like to watch,” he explained. “It's a dream, dream them up and they will work. If we get separated, we can communicate without alerting Ms Sèverine's projections.”

“Yes,” said M. “Good idea. Eve, let's try it now.”

“Why, Q, I'm impressed,” said Bond, giving him one of those little smirks that made Q want to punch him in the face.

“Your condescension, as always, is much appreciated, Mr Bond,” Q replied without looking up from his notes.

The date of the extraction was approaching: Sèverine had an appointment for her bi-monthly cosmetic touch-up, and Eve had arranged for the doctor to let them intervene once she was under. Now, they sat in the main floor of the Fortuna, as designed by Q and replicated by Eve, and tried to work through the last details.

“Are we sure about the doctor?” asked Bond. “I don't want this to turn out like that time in Oslo with the dentist...”

“I bought the whole clinic,” said Mallory, absently playing with the chips on the table; the silence that followed his words made him look up. “It seemed neater.”

“Right,” Bond glanced quickly at Q, smirking almost invisibly. “So the good doctor won't sell us out. How much time do we have, then?”

“The compound we'll be using to share the dream is an advanced Somnacin derivative. It creates a very clear connection between dreamers, whilst actually accelerating brain function. Brain function in the dream will be about twenty times normal,” Tanner answered, half answering Bond's question and half addressing Mallory; Q had noticed that their chemist seemed to have made it his duty that their employer went into the dreams knowing all the consequences. 

“And when you go into a dream within that dream the effect is compounded,” M added. “So, we have one hour of time with the mark topside...”

“Math was never my strong subject,” Bond interrupted. “How much time is that?

“That's twenty hours in the first level, and just over two weeks in the second,” Q calculated automatically.

“We're not going to need two weeks, obviously,” said M. “Five minutes in reality should give us plenty of time.”

“An hour and forty minutes in the first level, less than a day and a half in the second,” Q said, more for Bond's benefit than anything else.

“And once we've extracted the information, how do we get out?” Bond seemed much too comfortable in his role as devil’s advocate. “I'm hoping you have something more elegant in mind than shooting me in the head, since we're actually not allowed to die in the dream.”

“Well, obviously we'll need to coordinate a kick that will get us through the first level and then topside,” M replied.

“See, that's the clever part,” said Tanner. “I customised the sedative to leave inner ear function unimpaired. That way, however deep the sleep, the sleeper still feels falling, or tipping.”

“The trick is to synchronise a kick that can penetrate all three levels,” mused M.

“Musical countdown?” suggested Eve. “Tanner can start it topside, I'll hear it here and I can then set it up for Bond to hear one level down.”

It was both easier and more complicated than Q expected, he mused, as they spread over the casino to test his idea. The plan was simple, but the execution had to be flawless.

“The first thing I'm doing after this job is to figure out a way to communicate between levels,” he murmured.

“Wait after your first extraction to revolutionise dreamsharing, robot boy,” Eve said; the sound through the radio in his ear was flawless, and Q raised his glass to her across the room.

He was standing on the security alcove of the Fortuna, watching as M stalked around, checking for accuracy; he watched her walk, without a second glance, past the secret passage he'd installed between the first floor and the Komodo dragon pit.

“Q, can you read me?”

“I think you are having too much fun with this spy fantasy of yours, Mr Bond.”

“That's a yes, then. I'm in the dream den.”

“Communications are working well, maybe we should try the second level.”

“Please do. I'm looking forwards to tipping you all into a pool of freezing water,” Eve piped in as she climbed the stairs.

“I'm sure there must be a kick method that doesn't involve pain and suffering,” Q complained, following her to the dream den.

“Work on that too while you're changing the dreamsharing world, robot boy.”

Q had installed a simple trap under the floor of the dream den so that Eve only had to push a button to tip them all (except for Sèverine, of course) into awakening. Efficient, he thought.

“See you topside,” Eve said cheerfully, leaning to adjust the headphones on Bond. “And try not to get shot.”

“How am I going to get shot if you're staying here?” he asked.

“I'm sure that if you ask nicely, Q will oblige.” Eve smirked, then pressed the timer on the PASIV, and Q felt his eyes close before he could glare at her.

He opened them again only to stare at a wide array of screens, showing him a series of cold, empty corridors. Q was in the security room of the metro station, standing in front of the speaker that would put him in contact with the rest of the team through their radios, if all went well.

“Bond, can you hear me?” he said into the speaker on the table in front of him, looking at the screens to locate his teammates, who should have awakened at different points through the station.

“Yes,” came Bond's voice after a moment. “M? Mallory?”

“Yes, Bond, I can hear you both,” M voice said, at the same time that Mallory said, “Here.”

“Very well. Bond, you're in the upper platform. Do you remember the way to the interchange? Go there now and meet with M.”

“I'm on it.”

“Mallory, sir, please make your way up the stairs and into the second tunnel to your right.”

Q checked on his teammates through the many security cameras he had painstakingly taught Bond to place all through the maze, and once he was sure that everyone was moving in the right direction, he left the monitoring room, slipping a detonator into his pocket. He'd have enough time to check Bond had built everything correctly before he heard the musical countdown and made the charges under the interchange explode.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fashion notes:
> 
> - _... the bodice reminded him of a staircase, one of those wide, softly curved outdoor ones that were built to be as much of a meeting place as a way to get from lower to upper ground._ \- Q's description of [Moneypenny's dress from the casino scene](http://dfotw.tumblr.com/post/40524609191/q-wasnt-lying-when-he-called-eves-casino-gown) is partial to his real interests.  
>  - _“I wouldn’t be caught dead in a suit Bond approved of,” said Q, faking a small shudder to make Eve laugh. “A friend in London gave me a hand, I'm now the proud owner of a Dries Van Noten.”_ \- [Q wears a tux](http://dfotw.tumblr.com/post/44788124069/q-wearing-a-dries-van-noten-tux-for-my-fic-here-i) by the same designer of his hideous mustard cardigan, modern enough to give Bond a fit. He probably has connections with fashion and design students back in London who help him get designer clothes at reasonable prices.


	6. Level One - Death and Distraction

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's title comes from Edward Gorey's [The Inanimate Tragedy](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCdlARaRSqs).

Q had been rather more concerned with the problems they would have to face in reality than about the extraction itself, but everything went smoothly to begin with. The team made their separate ways into the building where Dr Pereira had his practice, and they waited in a small office until his nurse came to tell them everything was ready and Sèverine was already sedated.

Q had practice with dreams, felt confident in them; in real life, watching Tanner check his gun while Eve set up the PASIV next to the limp form of their mark laid on the cot, the reality of what they were about to do hit him rather more strongly.

“Are you well?” asked Bond as he placed five chairs in a circle around where Sèverine laid.

“Of course, I'm fine,” said Q, straightening up. “Let’s do this.”

Bond mercifully didn’t say anything else, but he sat by Q as they hooked themselves to the PASIV and looked at him like he’d done in the plane to Shanghai, careful and yet keeping his distance.

“See you in five minutes,” said Tanner, and Q looked at Bond before closing his eyes.

He opened them again in the half-darkness of the Fortuna; he took a deep breath, adjusted his cuffs and began to make his way between the elegantly dressed players over to the alcove above the stairs where he could take charge of security. He paused halfway there to allow the petite, imperious form of Madame Lu to pass him by without giving him a second look, and took the opportunity to look around and try to spot the other members of the team.

That’s when the first shot rang out.

Q ducked instinctively, as did most of the projections, when a spray of bullets took out half the lamps.

“Eve!” he called out, trying to spot the chartreuse satin of her gown from under the table where he was taking refuge; he spotted someone else, however, and scrambled across the floor to help Sèverine (gorgeous in a black dress and flawless make-up) hide behind a column.

“What the hell is going on?” he heard from his radio, M’s voice tight with fury.

“Q!” Judging from his voice, Bond had dropped Madame Lu’s forge, and also a great deal of his composure. “Q, are you alright?!”

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” Q replied as calmly as he could, putting an arm around the terrified form of the woman by his side. “Miss Sèverine is fine too, unless she’s allergic to gunpowder.”

He looked around, past the panicking projections and the chaos, trying to spot Bond, and instead saw a blond man, dressed in a white suit, leaning on the balustrade on the first floor, perfectly unconcerned.

“Who is that?” he asked Sèverine; he didn’t remember the man from Eve’s extensive file on the Fortuna’s staff, clients and contacts, though he seemed familiar.

“I don’t know,” she replied, following Q's eyes. “Why? What's happening?”

The man leant to shout something to a group of armed projections, and one of them began to move in their direction. Giving Sèverine an apologetic look, Q drew a gun from under his jacket and took careful aim.

The projection crumpled before Q could pull the trigger, and Eve appeared at the foot of the stairs, gesturing at him to join her.

“Come on,” he said to Sèverine, helping her up. “We’re sitting ducks here, come on, let’s get you somewhere safe.”

“Somewhere safe?” she asked with a disdainful laugh, but she followed Q as he ran towards the stairs under Eve’s cover.

“Go to the first floor, find M!” Eve said, not pausing in her shooting.

“Well, we can’t take the stairs,” Q said, using an upturned table as shelter for him and Sèverine. “I need you to cover us while we make for that door over there.”

“I’m on the balustrade to your right, I can cover you. M is here too,” Bond’s voice said in Q’s ear. “Q, Eve's lost her radio, get her to come with you, she's the dreamer and the projections are after her.”

“Eve, come on, Bond will give us cover... oh, and Mallory?” Q asked belatedly.

There was a pause.

“He’s here too,” said Bond, at the same time that M snapped, “Oh, do hurry up!”

Under more bullets than Q was comfortable thinking about, they picked their way to the small door concealed by the first floor bar, stumbling over wounded projections and broken furniture. In real life, the door opened to a small corridor that led to the kitchens, but Q had redesigned it as a twisting staircase that led them straight to the second floor, only two corridors away from the dream den.

“Are you OK?” he asked Sèverine as they waited for Eve to give them the all-clear at the top of the stairs.

“Fine,” the woman answered; her wine-coloured lips were shaking, but she drew a slim pistol from a thigh holder and gave Q a challenging look. “Who are you?”

“Come on, let’s go!” Eve called out, and Q took Sèverine’s hand to lead her to the next corridor.

“We’re going to have to run Mrs Charles,” M’s voice said into his ear as Q moved to cover Eve.

“You must be joking,” Bond replied at once, over the crack of gunfire.

“Who is that?” asked Q.

“A bad idea,” said Bond.

“Well, it’s obvious that the mark is militarised,” said M. “We’re not going to be able to go one level deeper with her security all over us. We run with Mrs Charles like we did on the Stein job.”

“So, you’ve done it before?” asked Q as Eve slid by his side.

“Yes, and it didn’t work,” said Bond. “The subject realised he was dreaming and his subconscious tore us to pieces.”

“Excellent,” said Q, too high on adrenaline to curb his sarcasm. “But you learnt a lot, right?”

“Let’s go!” said Eve again, and the three of them threw themselves across what used to be the first-floor bar.

Bond was crouching under the balustrade, gun in hand, and he barely paused in his shooting to gesture them to go into the dream den; Q saw Eve take Sèverine along, so he stopped and waited for Bond and M to retreat from their positions.

“So,” said Bond, joining him behind a corner, “now we're trapped in Sèverine’s mind, battling her own private mafia, and if we get killed, we'll be lost in limbo till our brains turn to scrambled egg.”

“Save your optimism for another day,” rasped out M, coming up to them. “She must have been militarised in the dream den here, no wonder it didn’t show up in Moneypenny’s research.”

“Mallory?” Q asked again, looking around.

Bond nodded towards the door to the dream den before leaning across Q to shoot down a projection.

“He got shot trying to help me,” M said sourly. “He's inside.”

“Is he going to…?”

“When we get down to the lower levels the pain will be less intense,” the extractor replied. “But, for that, we need to calm Sèverine down enough that she takes to the PASIV voluntarily, and for that, we need Mrs Charles.”

“Knock yourself out,” said Bond. “I’ll stay here and try to keep the projections at bay.”

“I’ll stay here too,” said Q. “Sèverine is already wondering who I am.”

M walked into the dream den, and Q exchanged a worried look with Bond.

“My name is Mrs Charles, you remember me, don't you? I'm the head of your security down here…” M’s voice said in his ear, and Q tuned it out to focus on helping Bond with the projections.

“Bit rough for your first job, huh?” asked the forger, the corner of his lips twitching up in a smile.

“Just a bit,” Q replied, huffing a laugh as he leant on a chair to take a shot. “So, who or what is Mrs Charles exactly?”

“It's a gambit, designed to turn the mark against her own subconscious.”

“It sounds right up your alley, why don't you approve?” asked Q, taking cover behind the bullet-ridden wall.

“Because it involves telling the mark that she's dreaming, which involves attracting a lot of attention to us.”

“Never thought I’d see the day where you were trying not to attract attention,” Q said, trying to stifle a grin.

Bond shot twice, then turned to give Q a baleful look, only belied by the twist of a smile on the corner of his lips.

“Anyway, didn't M say never to do that?”

“Mmmm,” said Bond, smirking as he took down a projection with a clean headshot. “So now you've noticed how much time M spends doing things she says never to do.”

No, thought Q, suddenly discouraged, he’d noticed, he just hadn’t wanted to pay attention.

“Do you think M’s plan will work?” he asked instead, trying to make his voice sound firm.

“If anyone can do it, it’s her, I suppose. We’re not going to survive here for an hour as it stands, that’s for sure. Onwards is the only way forwards and all that.”

Neither of them mentioned trying to orchestrate an early kick. M had chosen her team well.

“Oh shit,” said Q after a moment. “Bond, there are at least ten men coming up the stairs, and they have a battering ram.”

Q took three shots, and took down one projection and injured another in the arm.

“Move over,” Bond said.

“What?”

“You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling,” Bond drawled, getting to his knees and hefting a grenade launcher onto his shoulder.

“If you set the building on fire, I swear…” said Q, trying to sound unimpressed through a suddenly dry throat.

The first grenade took out the group with the battering ram. Bond smirked as wood splinters and plaster rained down on them, and Q waited, hand tight around his gun.

Nothing.

“Bond, Q, come in,” M’s voice said through the radio.

Giving a last look for projections, Q scrambled through the door of the dream den, followed by Bond.

Sèverine lay on one of the sofas, asleep already; Mallory lay on another, blood blossoming on his shoulder.

“It worked,” Eve told them with a manic smile, her chartreuse gown spattered with blood and gunpowder. “She really thought M was her own projection. For a moment there I thought she was going to shoot herself in the head, but it worked.”

“The projections should be a little calmer now,” said M, unspooling the leads from the PASIV. “We proceed with the plan as before. Moneypenny, hold down the fort here. Mallory, do you...?”

“Yes,” said the man, holding out a trembling arm. 

“I think Q should hold the next level,” said Bond, sitting on the floor next to the PASIV while Q hurried to hook up Mallory, trying to ignore the blood dripping down his arm.

“What? Why?”

Q looked up from Mallory’s ashen face to see M and Bond having a staring contest over the PASIV.

“Fine,” the extractor said, pursing her lips. “Q, get ready.”

Giving a betrayed look to the forger, Q scrambled to hook himself up to the PASIV and the iPod Eve handed him.

Q closed his eyes to the sight of Eve pressing the timer on the PASIV with the hand that wasn’t holding a sub-machine gun.


	7. Level Two: Doom and Discrepancy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's title comes from Edward Gorey's [The Inanimate Tragedy](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCdlARaRSqs).

After the violent chaos of the first level, Q couldn’t help but breathe a sigh of relief when he opened his eyes to the quiet, neat security room on the Shanghai metro station.

“Bond, M, Mallory, answer me,” he called into the speaker in front of him, hoping that everyone had remembered to dream up their radios properly, in spite of the chaos.

He took a seat and looked at the screens in front of him. The station was crowded with projections, and Q pulled a computer with a facial-recognition software he had lifted straight out of a spy film; the results weren’t perfect, but they were better than nothing.

“I hope one of you has found Miss Sèverine,” he muttered.

“I’m at the interchange,” said M, and Q turned his eyes to that screen, spotting the extractor near the information booth.

“I hear you, M.” Q hadn't expected Sèverine's subconscious to be so busy, and he struggled to find familiar faces in the crowd. “Mallory? Are you alright?”

“I’m fine,” the businessman said. “I’m in the South platform, trying to make myself a sling. But I’m fine.”

“Bond?” Q’s roving eyes detected a tall, well-dressed figure battling the flow of the crowd in a corridor. “Oh, I see you. There you are.”

“I know where I am, Q,” Bond said. “Where is she?”

“Give me a moment.” Q scanned the crowds, looking for darkly-painted lips and arched eyebrows. “I’ve got her. M, take the corridor to your right, she’s coming right towards you.”

“I’m on it.”

“Right, so…”

Q’s hearing fuzzed out for a second when he spotted, on a screen to his right, a familiar face that shouldn’t be there.

“OK, who the hell brought their projections in?” he snapped. “The same blond man who was giving the projections orders in the first level is on the North platform, and he is not one of Sèverine’s.”

There was a pause, and then Q remembered: it was the same projection who had stabbed him in his second ever dream. He had to be M’s, then.

“Tell me where he is,” said Bond.

“Bond, who is he?”

“Just tell me where he is,” the forger demanded. “And keep an eye on M and the mark, get them moving away from him.”

Q bit his lip, anger replacing fear.

“M, I see you’ve met Miss Sèverine, now go back to the interchange and up the stairs behind the cafè. There’s a safe room there with a laptop, I trust you can do the rest.”

“Q,” interrupted Bond. “Where is he? Do you read me, Q?”

“Yes, yes, I can hear you. Just keep moving forward. Enter the next service door on your right. If you're through that door, you should be in the tunnels.”

“He’s in the tunnels?”

“I’m giving you a shortcut, are you going to complain all the way?”

“Alright, alright… I’m going down the stairs.”

“Once you’re in the tunnels, call back.”

Q gave Bond time to reach the tunnels, and turned to check on M and Sèverine (who had reached the safe room), and on Mallory (who was sitting on a bench, arm in an improvised sling).

“Mallory, can you walk?”

“Yes,” said the man at once.

“Right, I want you to leave the platform and go up the first two flights of stairs. Speak up when you’re there.”

“I’m in the tunnels,” Bond piped in.

“There should be a service door on your left.”

“Got it.”

“You found the door?”

“I… yes.” There was a thudding sound. “It won’t open.”

“Of course it will, put your back into it,” snapped Q, frowning. He had designed the station to be new, clean, in perfect condition; there was no reason why the door wouldn’t open.

“Why don’t you come here and put your back into it?” asked Bond. There were more thudding sounds and then a pause. “No, it's stuck.”

“That’s vexing,” murmured Q, tapping furiously at the station controls. 

“Oh good, there’s a train coming,” said Bond.

“What do you mean there’s a train coming?!”

“Why would you tell me to get down here if you knew a train was coming, Q?”

“Why, I didn't know,” Q answered, not caring if he sounded out of his depth.

“Then, where did it come from?” asked Bond, but he sounded like he knew the answer.

“Bond.” Q could now hear the roar of the train approaching through Bond’s earpiece; then, two shots and a metallic bang. “Bond! Bond, are you alright?”

“I’m through,” the man said breathlessly over the rumbling sound of the train.

“Told you.” Q closed his eyes for a second.

“Q,” said Mallory.

“Right, you.” Q opened eyes. “Service door to your left, seventh door on your right. And don’t tell me it won’t open.”

“It opened,” said Mallory wryly. “I’m on my way.”

“Bond, up the stairs and into the upper platform…” Q's vision greyed out and a loud buzzing rang in his ears. “What's going on?”

“What is it?” Three voices asked as one through the speaker.

“Shit, shit, shit,” answered Q succinctly.

The screens in front of Q flickered, as did the station lights, and all doors, everywhere, started to open in unison. The train announcements and the security screens went blank, then flashed red. _Not such a clever boy_ , a Día De Los Muertos skull said mockingly. _Think on your sins._

“He hacked us,” Q breathed out, his heart pounding. “Can someone tell me how the hell he got into my dream?”

“M, damn it!” Bond shouted; Q could hear him breathe heavily. “Never mind how, Q. You have to retake control of the dream.”

“I’m on it!” Q snapped, pulling his laptop closer. “What are you going to do?”

“Can you tell me where he is?” asked the forger.

Q's head was pounding and his vision fading in and out. He knew he had to at least get the screens working again and the doors closing, keep the dream in one piece, but it felt as if his mind was rebelling against him, the dream fighting him like a particularly stubborn computer virus.

“Q?” Bond's voice was refreshingly steady. “Are you alright? Can you do this?”

“Give us a second, I'm looking for him,” said Q, because damned if he was going to tell Bond that the dream was getting the better of him.

A deep breath and a sudden mental push, and slowly, one by one, the screens returned to serve their function, and the doors started to close. Q breathed again and rested his shaking hands on the keyboard. He could do this.

“There's too many projections,” said a harried-sounding Bond. “I can't see him.”

“It's not my fault Miss Sèverine knows more about rush hour on the metro than you do.”

“Do I get on the train?” asked Bond.

The door behind Q clicked open, and he had turned around and was aiming his gun before he even realised what he was doing.

“Oh, it's you,” he said to Mallory; he lowered his gun and turned back to the screens. “We should be safe here, sit down, you look as if you're about to fall over.”

“Thank you,” Mallory replied, taking a chair out of Q's way.

“Q,” called Bond impatiently.

“What are we looking for?” asked Mallory.

“Tall man, hair dyed blond, strong features...” Q focused and a picture of the stranger as he'd seen him in the first level came up on his laptop. It wasn't the time to be fascinated by the flawless connection between a dreamer's mind and his technology in the dream, but Q appreciated it all the same. “That's him. He should be around the upper platform.”

“The train is leaving,” said Bond; judging by his voice, he was talking between gritted teeth. “Do I get on the train?”

“Don't get on the train until we know if he's on it,” Q chided. “Give us a minute.”

Mallory touched Q's elbow and pointed at a screen.

“There.” 

Q zoomed in on the image with all the technology he could conjure in the dream. 

“Do I get on the train?” Bond rasped out as the doors closed, sounding as if he were asking a distant deity.

“Bond,” Q said, and grimaced as he saw the train begin to move, “get on the train.”

There was the sound of much swearing and running.

“He'll make it,” said Mallory reassuringly.

“He'd better,” said Q, cringing at the sound of a body slamming against glass. “Bond, do try not to aggravate the projections further, will you? They're agitated enough as it is, and my control of the dream is shaky at best.”

Silence.

“Bond? Where are you?”

“Take a wild guess, Q,” the forger replied, only slightly breathless. 

“Bond.” Q took a deep breath. “The projection, he's looking for M, isn't he?”

“Yes.”

“I'm going to keep the train running so the problem is contained there, do you hear me? It's not going to stop again, Bond. You think you can deal with it?”

“I'm on it, Q, don't worry. You keep an eye on M.”

Q did glance at the room where M and Sèverine sat, looking at a laptop, unbothered by projections, but he couldn't help if his attention drifted back to Bond. 

“Be careful,” he murmured into his radio, not expecting Bond to listen.


	8. Level Two: Duplicity and Desolation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's title comes from Edward Gorey's [The Inanimate Tragedy](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCdlARaRSqs).

With the dream in a state of flux, it was easy to make security cameras and microphones appear on each wagon of the runaway train to show Q how Bond was making his way towards where the blond projection stood; the cameras also showed all the other projections rushing out of the wagon where the stranger was, panicking more than they should even considering the projection was armed.

“Hello, James!” the blond man called out; it would have been cheerful if it weren't for the grimace on his face. “I haven't seen you in a while. And never face to face. Since that dream in a pagoda where I shot you in the kneecaps, you've been very careful to keep your distance.” 

Bond didn't answer, stopping a few yards away from the projection, cautiously drawing his own weapon.

“You're trying to keep me away from her, aren't you?” The projection smiled; Q felt a pull on his control of the dream and held on more tightly. “You don't really know who I am.”

“Raoul Silva, isn't it?” asked Bond, and from his voice Q would have thought he was introducing himself at a cocktail party. “You were M's pointman and her forger... twenty years ago? Twenty five?”

“Um-hmm.” The projection nodded. “From '86 to '97, right after she left the military. Back then, I was her favourite. And you're not nearly the forger I was, I can tell you that. Just look at you, barely held together by your pills and your drink...”

“Don't forget my pathetic loyalty.”

Silva acknowledged this with a hair-rising little laugh.

“Does she ever mention my name?” he asked, almost coquettish.

“I should think she barely remembers you,” Bond replied.

“Oof!” exclaimed the projection, raising a hand to his chest in a theatrical gesture of despair. “I would believe you, if it weren't because of my presence here. I'm here. She has not forgotten. And you want to know why?”

The projection lowered his gun and Q could breathe a little easier, though the projection's speech was giving him the shivers.

“She'll tell you that regret is unprofessional, but she has regrets. And she should have them.” Silva took a seat in the now deserted wagon. “I went along with her plans, I dropped into the third level of a dream held together with spit and hope, just to please her. And when it collapsed, I fell into Limbo. And I waited. And waited. And waited. Until I realised, she wasn't going to come for me. She betrayed me. She left me there for years, for years upon years upon years. I waited a life, ten lifetimes for her, and she didn't come. I tried to kill myself a million times. I didn't die. Life clung to me like a disease. And then I understood why I had survived. I needed to look in her eyes one last time.”

Q felt like throwing up, not just at the projection's description of what Limbo was like (the fate they were all still at a risk of falling into), but at the thought of what Bond might be forced to remember from his own stay there. They had joked around the issue, but they had never discussed the months (years, lifetimes) Bond had spent in Limbo or how he had clawed his way back only to risk it again at M's orders.

“Well, I hope it was worth it,” said Bond, his tone perfectly steady. 

“You tell me,” Silva replied. “Was it worth it to you?”

“I made my own choices,” said Bond.

“Hmm. You think you did. That's her genius. But you're still clinging to your faith in that old woman, when all she does is lie to you.”

“She never lied to me.” Even Q from the security room could hear the lack of conviction in Bond's voice.

“No?” asked Silva, politely amused.

“No.”

“In that job, in Istanbul, she told you she didn't know the effects that sedation would have if you got shot. But she did. She did and she gave Tanner her share of the profits if he didn't tell you. She did and she told Moneypenny to take the bloody shot knowing what it could mean to you.” Silva made a face. “Mummy was very bad.”

Q's stomach churned with anger on Bond's behalf, and fear; he'd all but forgotten about the rest of the dream.

“Why should I argue with you? You're dead,” Bond said after a long pause. “M took you off life support three months after you went into a coma.”

“If I were really dead, we wouldn't be having this conversation, Mr Bond,” said the projection. “As an experienced dreamer, you should know that we leave pieces of ourselves in others. No one is truly dead while they are still remembered, and I am remembered more than you will be once I'm done with you.”

Bond didn't reply. Silva turned towards him, his gun casually pointing straight at the forger.

“How you're trying to remember your training now,” he said, almost affectionately. “What are the rules to cope with a shade, I wonder? Well, first time for everything.”

Q saw Bond smirk, and he breathed a little easier.

“What makes you think this is my first time?” asked the forger.

“Oh, Mr Bond!”

Silva threw himself to one side as Bond fired at him; the shade got hold of the emergency stop lever as he fell, and the train shuddered to a stop. One of the windows exploded in a shower of glass under three well-placed bullets.

“Damn it, Bond,” muttered Q.

“Don't bother, Q,” Bond said as he followed Silva out of the window and into the tunnels. “He's going to try and find M.”

“Yes, I got that far,” Q snapped, adrenaline flooding his veins. “M, can you hear me? M?!”

“What is it? I've almost got the informati-”

“Well, I've got your shade running loose and trying to take control of the maze,” Q interrupted. “I can't guarantee your safety even where you are, Silva is trying to shift the passages.”

“Where's Bond?” asked M, sounding a little rattled at last.

“He's out there, trying not to get shot.”

Q flushed a little under Mallory's surprised look, but he refused to apologise. If what the shade had said was true, Q's already waning loyalty towards their extractor had taken a critical hit.

“What are you doing?” Mallory asked.

“Just, monitoring,” answered Q, his typing too loud in the small room.

“You're creating a false breadcrumb trail for Silva to follow.”

“I'm just thinking, if I could buy Bond and M some time...”

“Stop thinking, get M and Sèverine isolated, force Silva into the service tunnels, where you can monitor his progress more accurately.”

Q barely had time to look up from his keyboard to acknowledge the advice of the weirdest businessman he had met in his life

“Q.” Bond sounded breathless, worried at last.

“He's gone down the manhole ahead of you. I'm trying to get cameras in the service tunnels below, why don't you wait until I can tell you what to expect before you...?”

They heard the clanging noise of Bond's feet on the metal rungs.

“Or ignore me and go in blind, yes,” muttered Q as he fought his own design in order to see what Bond was doing. “How the hell is that projection getting so much control over my dream?” 

“He's part of M,” said Mallory from where he sat, blood beginning to bloom in the shirt above his shoulder. “He knows what she knows, and what M doesn't know about dreams hasn’t been invented yet.”

“Shit. I should have known better,” Q sighed. “I did, really. But this might have been my one shot at getting into dreamsharing, and... Bond, on your left!”

“Why, Mr Bond, you caught me!” Silva laughed, hanging from another metal ladder. “Now, here's your prize. A last gift for your architect, too.”

“Bond, move!” shouted Q as a section of the tunnel roof exploded and a train came barrelling through.

Nothing but static came through the radio. The screens were blank. Q felt his control of the dream begin to slip again.

“Bond,” he called into the radio.

“Q, the shade is coming onto the platform,” said Mallory, who was keeping one eye on the screens.

“See if I care... Bond, damn it, answer me! Bond!”

“Q,” the forger said, followed by a rattling cough, and Q breathed at last. “Where is he?”

“Where do you think?” asked Q, trying to sound calm. “Are you injured? I hope not, because I need you to climb that metal ladder.”

“On it.”

“M?”

“Yes.”

Q hesitated, not knowing what the protocol was for this kind of situations.

“Is the dream stable?” the extractor asked, instead of addressing the issue of the shade that was rampaging through the dream.

“As stable as it can be, considering the circumstances,” Q answered, because he was still proud of his work even if half of it had come unravelled.

“Let me know if he gets close.”

“What are you planning to do?” asked Q, and then moved his attention to another screen. “To your right, Bond, I'm trying to throw obstacles in his way to slow him down.”

M didn't answer; Q felt her silence was deafening, even with the noise of Bond's breathing coming through the speakers.

“Can I do something?” asked Mallory.

Q shook his head.

“M, whatever you're going to do, do it now,” he said. “He's about to get to you and Bond is still a way off.”

Q could see M emerge into the interchange, holding the laptop with the information in one hand, and a gun in another; behind her, Sèverine looked lost, her khol-lined eyes darting here and there.

“Bond, stop.” Q was gratified when the forger obeyed at once. “I'm going to do one last thing and then I'm going to have to focus on not letting the dream get away from me.”

“Well, get on with it.”

Q gritted his teeth as he focused, and the screens in front of him blurred into static as the station twisted impossibly, corridors and tunnels winding and unwinding to deposit Bond was near the interchange as possible.

“Bond?”

There was no answer, only shouting and gunshots; Q had to close his eyes and remind himself to breathe as the dream threatened to unravel around him. Blood rushed in his ears, and distantly he could feel Mallory putting a steadying hand on his arm as he struggled to keep it together, his mind at battle with Silva's pernicious influence.

A rapid series of gunshots were heard through the speaker and suddenly, it was as if a massive weight had been lifted from Q's shoulders; he raised his head and breathed.

“Bond? M?” he asked.

“Too many people have died because of me...” M's rough voice was saying.

“Q? I need help,” said Bond into his radio.

“Yes, yes, what happened? I'm trying to get the cameras back online, where are you?”

“I've got M, we're about to disappear.”

“What?”

“Sèverine is dead.”

“Oh, shit.”

“Silva is not here any more, but I need you to do something for me,” Bond continued. “I need you to create a safe room, a room impregnable to projections, and put a PASIV in there. Do you think you can do that?”

“I'm thinking this wasn't strictly in our plans,” Q said sarcastically, pulling up the plans for the level on his laptop.

“Not even remotely.” In spite of all, Bond sounded amused.

“So much for my promising career in dreamsharing,” Q sighed; Mallory snorted a laugh from where he was sprawled on his chair. “How far can you go?”

“As far as we need to, but preferably not much.”

“Are you wounded?!”

“M is.”

“Damn it.” Q swore softly while altering the plans on his laptop. “You're close to the ticket hall. Go into the service door by the side of the exit.”

“The orange one, yes?” Bond asked after a moment.

“Oh, because I suppose that's completely inconspicuous,” grumbled M.

You had to give it to her, thought Q, white-knuckled, as he watched Bond manhandle their extractor into the passage he had just created for them. M was going to go down fighting until the very end, fighting her enemies and her allies and herself.

“Bond, what are you going to do?” he asked. “You have the laptop, you have the information, why aren't we getting a kick back to the first level? If Sèverine is dead, there's nothing you can do for her.”

“We're going down one more level.”

“I got that, yes,” Q said, not bothering to conceal the bitterness in his voice. “Listen, Sèverine isn't going to be there, she's in Limbo now, there's nothing you can do.”

Bond didn't answer; Q could imagine him, exchanging a look with M, both tangled up in old secrets.

“But this isn't about her, is it?” asked Q, knowing that M was listening. “Do you think you can just build a prison of memories to lock Silva in? Do you really think that's going to contain him?”

No one answered.

“Turn right.” Q felt suddenly, crushingly exhausted. “The third door on the left, I've coded it to your palmprint. The PASIV should be inside.”

“Q.” There was the sound of Bond opening the door and closing it behind him, a heavy metallic clang. 

“Go,” Q said. “Just... hook yourselves up and go.”

“Q.”

“Whatever it is, tell me when you come back.”

Q only realised what he had said (what he had really meant), once he heard Bond's sharp intake of breath on the other end of the line.

“Q!”

“If it's not urgently related to the job at hand, Mr Bond, I don't want to hear it. The sooner you're gone, the sooner I can try to fix the mess you've made.”

“Q.” This time it was M, her voice going a little thready.

“Yes, ma'am?”

“Well done. Now try not to let the whole thing collapse before we're ready.”

“Yes, ma'am,” said Q, and swallowed bile, anger, and fear.

“Q, security is going to hunt you down,” Bond said, his voice hoarse.

“And I will lead them on a merry chase,” Q replied, as brightly as he could.

“Just be ready for the kick.”

“Go to sleep, Mr Bond.”

Q was very proud that his voice didn't waver at all.


	9. Level Three - And So The Sleeping Hours Are Through

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's title comes from The Decemberists' _Cocoon_.

There was a long pause after the sound of the PASIV being activated came from the speaker. Q didn't know what to say or what to do, and he wasn't sure what he was feeling either. Mostly anger, he supposed; anger and fear.

A figure moved on one of the screens, and Q forced himself to look up. The job wasn't done. The job wasn't done, the mark was dead, Bond was down in the third level with a wounded extractor and a murderous shade, and their client was bleeding out in a chair by his side... if all of them survived the job with their sanity intact, Q was going to stop believing in mathematics and start believing in miracles.

“How are you?” he said at last, looking back at Mallory.

“Fine,” the man replied, but he looked awful; blood was seeping from under the improvised bandage on his shoulder and he was pale under the flickering lights of the security screens. “And you?”

Q shrugged. He was exhausted and felt he could scream from frustration and worry, but at least he was in control of the dream again.

“Can you shoot?” he asked instead of calling Mallory on his lie.

“Yes.”

“There are still too many projections around.” Q opened a drawer, full of guns; no ammunition needed, the dream would provide enough. “We should relocate.”

“Let me guess, to the ultra-secure room you just created?”

Q smiled, just a little. It was a rare pleasure to work alongside someone who could keep up with him; that was the second reason he had not to have backed out of the job, even with the nagging suspicion he'd felt towards M.

“Yes. Besides, the laptop with the information you want is there too.”

Mallory didn't say anything else, but he took a gun with confident hands and waited patiently while Q checked all the screens to make sure which was the fastest, clearest path from the security room to the ticket hall.

“I'd bend the corridors again, but the projections are agitated enough,” he said to Mallory as he showed him the way on a station map. “If we can do this stealthily instead of the Bond way, that'd be for the best.”

“Understood,” said Mallory wryly. “I'll try to refrain from making anything explode.”

“That'd be a kindness. Ready?”

“As ready as I’m going to be.” Mallory tightened the bandage over his shoulder, put on a jacket to hide the blood, and stood by the door, gun in hand, waiting for Q to finish packing his laptop.

The moment they emerged from the service tunnels, Q tensed; the atmosphere was crackling with the threat of violence. Eyes followed them as they joined the crowd that still filled the station, and Q moved to stand at Mallory’s left to prevent any projections from bumping into his injured shoulder.

“We'd better take the long way around the service tunnels,” he said after a moment. “It’ll take us longer, but we’ll be out of sight more.”

“Very well,” said Mallory. “As long as we don’t get lost in there.”

“I’m an architect, I don’t get lost,” said Q, veering suddenly into a service door and pushing Mallory through. He closed it and locked it just in time to hear a projection slamming into it.

“Worse than you expected?” Mallory asked.

“I’d hoped that with Sèverine out of this level, the projections would calm down a little, but obviously not.” Once he was sure the door would hold, Q took the lead again, walking down one of the three corridors ahead of them. “I shouldn’t have done that last twist, but Bond was never going to get there in time if not.”

“You did well,” Mallory reassured him. “And you still have control of the dream.”

“Barely,” Q said, taking a deep breath as he closed fire-proof doors behind them. “And to think Bond was supposed to be the dreamer for this level.”

“No offence, but I’m glad it was you instead.”

Q smiled wanly.

“Not a big fan of explosions, I take it?”

“Not even in dreams, no.”

“Neither am I, though sometimes it’s as fun to destroy as it is to create.” Q paused in front of a door. “Alright. This will lead us to the north escalator, and from there, to the ticket hall. It should take us less than two minutes if the crowd doesn’t turn on us.”

“Got it.”

“Remember, no explosions unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

“Says the man with a detonator in his pocket.” 

Q grinned, his heart pounding in his chest; Mallory smiled back, checked his gun, and gestured for Q to open the door.

The crowd was thinner here, though no less tense. In silence, Q and Mallory joined the line to the escalator amidst dark looks and some jostling; when Q tried to shield Mallory’s injured shoulder, the man took him by the wrist and moved him away, closer to the wall.

“You’re the dreamer,” he said in a low voice as Q glared at him. “It’s you they’re aiming for.”

“But it’s not me who is injured.”

“I’m fine.”

Q let out an impatient huff of breath and looked around. Faces turned to stare at them as the escalator carried them up, much too slowly for his taste; he considered speeding it up, but he was afraid that was the drop of change which would tip the crowd’s mood from ‘wary’ to ‘actively hostile’. And then a memory came back to him, of fluorescent lights in a dream going wrong, and he almost laughed; it seemed a fitting tribute, considering all the things that had gone wrong so far, and the things that could go wrong still.

“Quick, give me a kiss,” he said, turning to Mallory.

Mallory stared at him for a second, then leant in and pressed his lips to Q’s, who could taste his bemusement.

“They’re still looking at us,” Mallory said when he drew back and glanced around them.

“Well,” said Q, swallowing a hysterical giggle, “it was worth a shot.”

The top of the escalator was almost within reach. A projection on the downwards staircase tried to grab Mallory’s arm as he passed.

“No help for it now, is it?”

“Wait until we’ve reached the end of the escalator, then start shooting.” Mallory gripped Q’s arm. “Remember, you’re the dreamer. You’re the objective, the priority is to keep you safe.”

“And you’re the client. If you end up dead, we don’t get paid,” said Q, shrugging off Mallory's hand to reach for his gun.

Instead of replying, Mallory raised an unimpressed eyebrow at Q as they reached the top of the escalator; in one move, the man stepped in front of Q and shot a projection which had started to approach them.

“Remember, the orange door!” Q said as he raised his weapon.

In response, Mallory felled three projections with three clean headshots.

“This might not be the best time to ask, but exactly what kind of businessman are you?” Q asked over the sound of gunfire.

“Formerly of the Hereford Regiment,” replied Mallory.

“Oh.” 

Q took a shot, missed, tried again, then kicked a projection in the knee; their advance was slow going and, for a moment, Q wished Bond was there to perform one of his legendary escapes. Then, he remembered where Bond was and what dangers he was facing, and he decided to focus on the present.

“Open the door, I’ll cover you,” Mallory said between gritted teeth as they finally picked their way through the ticket hall. “Be ready to shut it as soon as we’re inside.”

“It'd better not be stuck,” Q murmured, turning his back on the projections to face the bright orange door; Mallory pressed his back to Q’s at once, and he could feel the recoil from the businessman’s gun as he struggled with the lock. “I’m going through.”

Q stepped inside, then turned on his heel to shoot over Mallory’s shoulder as the man followed him inside. Both leant against the door to shut it, and as soon as they heard the lock click in place, Mallory crumpled to the floor, leaving a long bloodstain against the orange paint.

“Shit!” said Q, fumbling his gun into his pocket as he knelt by Mallory's side. “How bad is it?”

“Not much worse than it was before.” Mallory took a deep breath. “I'm fine, I can walk.”

Q gave him a doubtful look, but when the door behind them shuddered under the impact of a projection's foot, he helped the other man to stand up and sling his good arm over Q's shoulder.

“We're almost there,” Q said, trying to make his voice sound reassuring instead of shaky. “Oh look, bloodstains on the floor. We're definitely almost there.”

Q had fashioned the biggest, strongest door he knew when Bond's request had come through, and now that he was facing it, he had to admit that he might have gone a bit overboard. But with Mallory's weight on his shoulder and the memory of the grasping projections they had left behind, there was no time for self-criticism: Q pressed his hand to the scanner and waited as three tonnes of metal swung open to admit them.

The room beyond was small, windowless, featureless, with the barest furniture; aesthetics hadn't been a priority when Bond had been growling into his radio. Q let Mallory stumble inside and turned to check that the massive door closed correctly; unless the projections organised themselves enough to bring in explosives and a good knowledge of architectural integrity, they'd be safe there.

“Q.”

“Bloody hell.”

Literally. There was a pool of blood under M, soaking her light grey suit and almost reaching the PASIV's case.

“He said she was injured, he could have specified she'd been shot.” Q knelt by M's side, tried to examine her without making anything worse. “Through the lung, I think. Damn, there's nothing I can do. I don't even know first aid.”

Q sat back on his heels, cringing at the feeling of blood soaking through his trouser legs and at his own helplessness. Instead of staring at Bond (bruised and scraped, yes, but not shot and not bleeding all over the place), Q looked around until he spotted a sleek laptop behind the PASIV.

“Here,” he said, handing it to Mallory. “M made Sèverine put all the information in, all you need to do is look it up. And remember it.”

Mallory lowered himself into a chair and took the laptop with his good arm.

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

“Set up surveillance again, to start with.” Q sat on the floor opposite to where Bond was lying and opened his own laptop. “I won't change the dream again unless it's absolutely necessary, but at least I want to know what's going on out there.”

They worked in silence for a while. After Q was done re-routing the cameras to his laptop, he stood up, took off his cardigan and tore it to pieces; some he used to make a bandage to cover M's wound (the blue wool quickly became soaked in blood), some to wipe the floor, and one of the sleeves he saved to try and stem the bleeding in Mallory's shoulder.

“It's fine,” the man said as Q helped him out of his bloodstained jacket.

“Of course it's fine. You're only bleeding out.” Q sighed, tightening the makeshift bandage around the wound. “I don't even want to imagine how this looks on the first level.”

“How much time do we have on the clock?”

“More than a day still. Is all the information you wanted there?”

“Yes, everything is here, and some things I didn't even know we wanted.” Mallory closed the laptop and leant his head against the wall; he was pale and his hands were shaking.

“Mallory.” Q knelt in front of the man. “I'm going to give you the kick up to the first level.”

“Q-”

“No, listen to me.” Q met the man's eyes. “You have the information you wanted. You're injured, and the whole coordinated kick is already a wash. I need you to go up one level and tell Eve what's going on. And then, have her wake you up, because you won't last long like this.”

Mallory sighed and didn't answer, looking unconvinced.

“Tell Eve that Sèverine is in Limbo, and that Bond and M have gone down to the third level. Tell her that I'm staying here. Tell her...” Q paused. “Tell her that if she starts the musical countdown and I don't wake up, she's to kick herself back topside and make sure Tanner gives us more time.”

“Q, you can't-”

“Yes, I can. And I will.”

“If something happens to them down there, they'll be stuck, just like Sèverine. But you don't have to be.”

“I'm not immolating myself on anyone's pyre,” Q snapped. “But I'm not leaving Bond... and M, behind. Not while I can help.”

“So, you'll what? Stay here?”

“Yes, I'll stay here.”

“You're not going to hook yourself up to the PASIV after I've left, and follow them?”

“I... no,” said Q. “I'm not that stupid.” Mallory gave him a disbelieving look. “I'm not!”

Mallory scrubbed at his face with his good hand.

“Fine. I'll do my best to convince Miss Moneypenny to do what you've said...”

“Thank you.” Q felt faint with relief and the adrenaline comedown. 

“... if you promise that you won't go any further into the dream.” Mallory fixed Q with a steely look. “Stay here if you must, but don't risk your life any further.”

Q bit down on useless protests. Even if he did go down to the third level, he wouldn't be able to help; all he could do was to make sure that M and Bond were safe and had enough time to do whatever they were planning to do.

“I promise.”

“Alright, then. Let's hope M knows what she's doing. If not, we're all buggered.”

Q gave Mallory a small smile and tipped his chair backwards. When the chair clattered to the ground, Q was alone with the two dreamers. There was nothing left to do but wait.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I blame 90% of this chapter to the massive crush I've developed on Gareth Mallory. I regret nothing.


	10. Till Human Voices Wake Us, And We Drown

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's title comes from T.S. Eliot's [The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock](http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html).

Waiting didn’t come naturally to Q; just sitting around and doing something passive (like monitoring security screens or watching others dream) drove him crazy.

After setting up his laptop to cycle through all the security cameras that had survived the dream’s upheaval (the projections swarmed through the corridors and platforms angrily, upset but devoid of an objective), Q opened M’s laptop and memorised the information she had retrieved (lists of names, bank account numbers, money owed and paid). It barely took him an hour and a half.

He shifted restlessly for a few minutes, then he carefully took Bond’s handkerchief from his pocket and cleaned the cuts and scrapes in the forger’s face with water from the sink in the corner. Only two hours had passed. Six minutes for Eve and Mallory. Less than fifteen seconds for Tanner. Just over two days for Bond and M. An eternity for Sèverine.

Q sighed and tried to find a comfortable position in his chair. He was tempted, so tempted, to take a lead and plug himself into the PASIV; he cringed to think of what could be happening down there, in the dream Bond had built for M and her murderous shade. Would they survive an enraged Silva? Would they try to go to Limbo to rescue Sèverine, if such a thing was possible? What were the odds that Bond would survive something like that again?

“Probability doesn’t work like that, Mr Bond,” he murmured, placing a hand on the forger’s shoulder.

Q would be of no use down there. He didn’t know what kind of dream Bond would have come up with, and anyway, Silva had almost got the better of him in his own dream; Q would be more than useless in the third level, he would be a liability where Bond could afford none.

There was nothing but the waiting.

He must be crazy, Q thought, shaking his head ruefully at himself as he paced across the room. He must be insane to not have walked away when he could, when he started having his suspicions. He must be mad, to have been seduced by pure creation and Bond’s crooked smiled into a life of impossible crime and even more impossible danger. He could be at the university right now, sitting in the tiny grad student lounge, drinking tea and discussing the minutiae of Hieronymus Bosch’s architecture with Omar and Anne; instead, he slid to the blood-stained floor of a dream, next to a door more fitting of a bank vault, gripped a gun tightly, and waited.

Bond twitched in his sleep, and Q was across the room and smoothing the forger’s brow with the tips of his fingers before he even realised what he was doing. 

In the laptop screen he could see rioting projections vandalising the platforms and corridors. Q had designed the station to offer the minimum possible amount of materials for projections to inflict damage with, a reasonable precaution though this magnitude of hostility had been nothing but a distant possibility at the time; if Q survived the job, he was going to send a thank-you card to the professor in his third year who’d made them work for a semester designing prisons.

A fire broke out in the North platform. Q watched the sprinkler system get to work and wondered if he could survive locked in that room for two weeks, maybe even more if Mallory convinced Eve that it was necessary. He wondered if Bond could survive for months in whatever landscape he had built in the dream below.

The helplessness was what made the waiting that much harder.

Bond twitched in his sleep again. Q put the gun aside and moved to place the forger's head on his lap. The little movements could mean anything; Bond could be suffering some awful torture, running from a horde of projections, struggling not to fall of a building...

Q remembered his childhood, watching his cats sleep, twitching with dreams of the hunt, and swore he would make a thousand jokes if Bond woke up. He would say all the things he'd refrained from saying in an attempt to seem more professional, he would stop deflecting with sarcasm all of Bond's questions, he would accept his advice and ask for help when he felt out of his depth...

In his own way, Q was praying.

He'd almost had lost track of how much time had passed when the voice of Shirley Manson began to echo through the dream, slow and more than a little eerie: the musical countdown, Eve's first warning. Q considered giving himself the kick for about half a second, then settled himself more comfortably on the floor, determined to wait as long as it took, or as long as Moneypenny gave him.

One hour in reality was twenty hours in the first level, over two weeks in the second. Q would wait the whole fifteen days if he could, to give Bond (and M) a chance to wake up in a healthy manner.

Time had never passed so slowly for Q, not in the worst of his undergrad classes, not in the awful wait after he'd presented his dissertation, not in the waiting room of the hospital where his mother had died. He tried to distract himself calculating the time as it was passing in the other levels, watching the projections running rampant in the dream outside the service tunnels, trying to develop his idea of inter-level communication, filling sketchbooks with drawings of impossible towers, letting his fingers trace patterns on Bond's furrowed brow...

Nearly three days later, the forger's blue eyes opened. Q stopped breathing for a second.

“Bond,” he said, snatching his hand back from where it had been resting on the forger's throat, keeping track of his breathing and heartbeat.

“Q,” the forger rasped.

“M?” Q asked, although he didn't need to; the pool of blood under her body had stopped growing hours before, and her eyes hadn't opened.

“Dead.”

“Sèverine?”

Bond shook his head and sat up slowly. Q hesitated, but didn't move away; there was no way of pretending he hadn't been sitting with Bond's head in his lap, like some gangly mockery of a Pietà, and maybe the proximity to another living human being would ground the forger a little.

“Mallory?” asked Bond without looking at him.

“Gave him the kick to the first level,” Q replied. “He'll be fine.”

He'd had enough waiting to last him a lifetime, but Q patiently waited another minute while Bond sat with his head in his hands and breathed deeply; in spite of having been sitting on the cold floor for hours, he was warm where Bond's shoulder rested against his.

“Were you in Limbo?” he asked when Bond made as if to stand up.

Bond shook his head. 

“Didn't get that far. M was. Still is, I suppose.”

“You're not... going back for her?” Q didn't know if he sounded judgemental or worried.

“It's no use.” Bond had never sounded so defeated. “Even if I could find her, she wouldn't want to leave.”

“Right.”

Q stood up, straightened his shoulders, vainly tried to brush the wrinkles from his shirt. There were times and places for Bond to have a breakdown, and a saferoom in the second level of an unstable dream wasn't one of them; besides, Q didn't feel in the least well-equipped to provide consolation, understanding, or whatever Bond needed.

Eve would do a much better job, once they reached reality.

“How much time...?”

“Just under sixty-eight hours in this level,” Q answered at once. “Over three hours on the first level. Only ten minutes for Tanner.”

Nearly two months for Bond and M in the third level, Q didn't say, figuring that Bond didn't need the reminder.

“We're still well within schedule,” he added.

“What schedule?” scoffed Bond, starting to sound a little more like himself. “You were supposed to kick yourself out of the dream days ago.”

“Are you ready, then?” Q said with a small huff of indignation; he hadn't been expecting any gratitude, but not the overwhelming urge to punch Bond in the face either.

“Ready for?”

Q gave Bond a look.

“There's no coordinated kick any more. We need to get to the first level as soon as we can... well, no, Eve must have woken up, we'll go straight topside, the hard way.”

Bond didn't answer, looking at M's body.

“Bond,” Q snapped. “Let's go.”

The forger turned to Q, fixed his cufflinks, and gave a short nod. Q thought about saying something else, but decided to just hit the detonator in his pocket instead.

The whole station shuddered as the explosive charges set around the whole perimeter went off; Q met Bond's eyes, then closed his own.

He opened them again to the ceiling of the Fortuna's dream-den.

“Eve? Why are you still here?” Q asked, sitting up.

“Oh, thank God,” she answered from the doorway, where she sat with a machine gun in her lap. “Longest couple of hours in my life since Mallory come back, I tell you.”

“You sent him topside and stayed here?” Q asked, horrified at the thought of there being someone else crazy enough to stay in a doomed dream like he had done. “But I told him to tell you to give yourself the kick!”

“I don't take orders from you, robot boy.” Eve grinned, then leant out of the door, though the casino outside seemed quiet. “James, you didn't get shot this time, then?”

Bond gave her a grimace that wanted to be a smile.

“Eve, let's go,” said Q, hoping to delay the realisation until they were safely back in reality.

“Wait... M?” Moneypenny's face fell when her question was met with silence. “Is there nothing we can-?”

“Q's right, Moneypenny. Let's go,” Bond interrupted.

Q closed his eyes to the swooping feeling of the floor giving up under his feet. He opened them to the harsh lighting of Dr Pereira's surgery.

“Well?” asked Mallory, helping Q to sit up; for a second, Q was surprised not to see traces of blood on the man's shirt.

“We have to go,” said Moneypenny, standing up at once. “We have to get M out of here and be out of the city by the time they realise the mark will not wake up.”

“She won't wake up? What do you mean M won't-?” 

Tanner's questions went unanswered as Moneypenny efficiently began to pack up the PASIV, snapping orders as she worked. Bond moved to the doorway, to reassure the nurse with a smooth smile and a comment in Mandarin that made her laugh.

“Q, you take the PASIV, go check out from your hotel, and follow the emergency protocol. Tanner, you stay with me, we'll deal with M. Mallory...”

“I can leave the country at once, I have the resources.”

“We'll meet in Paris in three days. I'll contact you.”

There was no time for further goodbyes, no time for explanations or to make sure Bond was alright. Q passed by him on the doorway and gave him a look and a brief smile; the forger nodded at him and went back to distracting the nurse.

Q spent the whole thirteen hours of the Macau-Frankfurt flight shaking with the adrenaline crash, trying to decide if the brush of his fingers against Bond's as he left had been intentional or not. He didn't even have time to reflect how much he didn't like flying.

***

Three days later found Q at the Place George Pompidou, aimlessly browsing the wares of one of the many postcard sellers; he chose one of the museum at his back for Anne (who hated it with a passion and swore she'd seen garbage chutes more appropriate to hold modern art) and one of a black cat for his father. He looked up as he put the change in his pocket and saw Eve walking towards him, all elegance and high heels.

“Hi,” she said cheerfully, as if the last she'd seen him a great deal of guns and illegal narcotics hadn't been involved. “You're early.”

“Hello.” Q kissed both her cheeks. “How did everything go?”

“Fine.” She took him by the arm and dragged him down rue Rambuteau. “We managed to get M into a private clinic in Switzerland. She hasn't woken up yet. Tanner is staying with her.”

“Bond said she wouldn't wake up.”

“Has he got in contact with you?” Eve turned down a small side street.

“No.”

Eve was silent for a moment.

“I haven't heard from him since that day,” she said at last. “He had to leave Macau by land, but he should have got in contact already. And he hasn't.”

Q remembered all the promises he'd made on the second level, all the promises he'd begun to break the moment Bond opened his eyes, and felt instantly, irrationally guilty.

“Do you think...?”

“I don't know.” Eve squeezed Q's arm. “But don't worry, God knows he's got himself out of worse scrapes.”

“I'm not worried,” Q said, and Eve snorted at the obvious lie. “Where are going now?”

“We're meeting Mallory by the Tour Saint Jacques. He's already wired us our payment, but he wanted to talk to us, and after all that happened, well, I thought it was the least we could do.”

“So, I'm here as backup?” 

“And a fine backup you make, robot boy,” Eve told him with a smile. “Mallory likes you, and if I'm right and he wants to offer us another job, you can help sweeten the deal.”

Q didn't say anything.

“Unless you don't want to work with us again,” Eve continued. “I'd understand, it was a bit of a mess for your first job.”

“No, no.” Q shook his head. “You'll have to pry the PASIV from my cold, dead hands.”

“I'm sure that can be arranged,” said Eve, giving him a pleased smile. “Come on, let's see what Mallory has to say.”

The park was barely five minutes away. Mallory was sitting in one of the park benches at the foot of the tower, looking a bit incongruous amongst the tourists, the nannies and their charges, but Paris had seen weirder things, and no one gave any of them a second look.

“Ms Moneypenny, Q, I'm glad to see you both well,” said Mallory, standing up to shake their hands. “I think it's time to let you know that I work for MI6.”


	11. And Indeed There Will Be Time

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once again, infinite thanks go to my wonderful beta reader, [Wlan](http://archiveofourown.org/users/wlan/pseuds/wlan). I couldn't have done it without you, princess!
> 
> This chapter's title comes from T.S. Eliot's [The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock](http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html).

By the time Q reached his hotel, his heart was still pounding. Being headhunted by MI6 was only marginally less stressful than being in a collapsing dream, and though Mallory had been exquisitely polite about presenting them with his job offer, the fact remained that the British secret service had been, and still was, keeping tabs on them.

But even the excitement and glamour of being recognised as an international dream criminal wasn't enough to fully distract Q from the worry over Bond. Over Bond, who was missing; over Bond, who had failed to check in with Moneypenny; over Bond, who'd been left alone to dodge the Chinese mafia after witnessing (or worse, helping along) what amounted to the death of his mentor.

Over Bond, who always laughed at Q's hair where it was mussed after a long session of dreaming; over Bond, who'd hesitated the first time he had to shoot Q out of a dream; over Bond, who matched Q quip for quip and who allowed himself a tiny thing of a smile when Q managed to get the last word.

Q stopped on the last flight of stairs and told himself to breathe. Bond would be fine. Bond had been through worse. Even though Moneypenny's eyes were shaded with worry, even though a history of improbable escapes did not guarantee or imply future success (“Probability doesn't work like that”), even though Q had broken all the promises he'd made to non-existent gods in his dreams... Bond would be fine. He had to be.

Q's hands were still shaking as he swiped his keycard and walked into his room.

“How the hell have you secured the PASIV? Am I going to blow up the whole hotel if I try moving it, or just half?”

“Bloody buggering hell,” said Q, leaning against the door. “Bond.”

“Q,” replied the man from where he was kneeling in front of the room's tiny closet, giving Q a perfunctory nod.

“You b-!” Q bit off whatever was about to come out of his mouth, closed his eyes for a moment, took a deep breath. “Why haven't you checked in with Moneypenny? She thinks you're still stranded somewhere in Mongolia.”

“The client is having you followed.”

“Mallory? Yes, he...” Q narrowed his eyes at the forger, hoping Bond wouldn't notice how badly his hands were shaking. “How long have you known about this?”

“That Mallory works for MI6? Since the first time I went under with him. Too good with a gun to be just a businessman.”

“And you didn't see fit to tell anyone about this because?”

Q hadn't even had time to feel relieved; he'd gone from fear to surprise to being absolutely bloody furious in the space of thirty seconds.

“I told M,” said Bond defensively.

“Yes, because M was so good at sharing secrets, wasn't she?”

Bond stilled. Q felt awful (the woman wasn't even dead yet, for goodness' sake) but when the forger turned to look at him, Q glared back, undaunted.

“We can still run,” Bond said after a moment, ignoring Q's outburst. “Disable the little death trap you have here, I have a safe way out of this hotel. We can be in Italy by lunchtime and in Algeria before nightfall.”

“What makes you think-?” Q started to ask, and interrupted himself when Bond's expression went blank. “Bond, I realise that your past associates must have made it quite impossible for you to even look up 'trust' in a dictionary, but...” Q ran a hand through his hair. “I'm not grabbing the PASIV and running away with you to Africa.”

“Oh.”

Bond stood up. Somehow, his suit was immaculate, not even a little wrinkled at the knees, or bulging where Q knew Bond must be hiding a gun. Q wanted to punch him. He also wanted to grab him and never let him go.

“Do you even know what Mallory wants?” Q asked instead.

“Do you?” asked Bond in return.

“No, Eve and I were just talking to him about where to find the best croissants, what do you think?”

Q allowed himself to go and sit on the bed; Bond watched him, tense, keeping his body slightly angled towards the door.

“I'm not running away with you,” Q said again, in what he hoped was a sensible yet conciliatory tone of voice, “because there is no reason to run.”

“Apart from the fact that MI6 is on our trail?”

“Mallory isn't trying to get us arrested. He wants us to work for him.”

To his credit, this new piece of information didn't throw Bond for more than half a second.

“Do you want to be a deniable asset? That's even worse than running away to Africa with me.”

“You're not listening, Bond. We're not playing Shadowrun!” Bond's blank look probably meant that he hadn't caught the reference; Q was secretly glad. “Mallory wants us to work for MI6. He's at the head of the Intelligence and Security Committee, a new thing they've come up with for making dreamsharing serve Queen and Country.”

“They've tried that before.” Bond's posture relaxed a little, but his voice was still as uncompromising as before. “How do you think I got into dreamsharing? And M? The military have tried turning dreamsharing to their advantage since before you were born.”

“Yes, and look where it got them, and you,” Q snapped. “Mallory doesn't want us for some crude training exercises, or to teach us to withstand torture to the point where we can't flick a lighter without flinching.” 

The forger might have been the expert at observing people, but that didn't mean Q was blind, particularly not when it concerned Bond. He'd caught glimpses of the forger's totem, a silver lighter, and had seen how he reacted to certain sounds, in dreams and topside.

“Mallory has seen first hand the kind of work we can do, and he knows what kind of asset we could be,” Q added in a more conciliatory tone.

“Brave new world,” muttered Bond, turning towards the door. 

“Where are you going?”

“You've got Mallory now, don't you? You don't need me.”

“Oh, for f-! Bond, who do you think Mallory wants to be our extractor?” Q watched Bond stop. “He wants us, the team. You, and me, and Moneypenny, and Tanner.”

“They should say yes,” said Bond. “A steady pay cheque would do them well. They like Mallory. So do you, apparently.”

Q magnanimously decided not to acknowledge the last statement or its vaguely accusatory tone.

“They won't say yes if you don't.”

Bond looked away briefly, uncomfortable.

“And you?” he asked.

“Me?” asked Q. “Now you want my opinion?”

“I always want your opinion.”

“Yes, to ignore it,” said Q peevishly. 

“If you want to accept, that's fine.” And it was clear from the tightness of Bond's voice that it was not.

Q again considered punching him.

“Mallory has seen what we can do, he trusts us to get the job done.” Q sighed and hated himself for what he was about to say. “Besides, without M, we've lost most of our reputation in the business. If we want to work, it's either this or starting from the ground again.”

Bond said nothing.

“What were you planning to do?” Q asked. “If not this, then what?”

If Q had been the type unsettled by being the focus of someone as Bond, he wouldn't have been in the dreamsharing business, but it still gave him pause when those blue eyes turned to him.

“Strike out.” Bond shrugged. “I have some contacts left.”

“On your own?! Surely you are not this stupid, Bond.”

“You could run point,” said Bond, and it took Q a moment to understand that this statement was, in fact, related to the conversation they had been having. 

For a second, he was wildly tempted to accept. He and Bond, running around the world, dreaming bright, impossible things, free and crazy and absolutely destined to disaster... the part of Q that had led him to throw himself into dreamsharing without looking back stirred with interest.

“Yes, I could. But I couldn't run point and build at the same time.”

“You could.”

“Not if I wanted to perform both jobs optimally. Multitasking is possible, but it can lead to distraction.”

Bond glared at hearing his own words thrown back at him. Q glared right back.

“Besides,” Q added, “Moneypenny would put us under and shoot us both if we took the PASIV and left her behind.” 

He'd always thought that making jokes about Bond's time in Limbo was in terribly poor taste, but there it was, a small smile in the corner of Bond's mouth, enough to make something loosen inside Q's chest.

“So, you'll accept?” Q asked, willing to press his advantage when he had it. God knew that Bond wasn't afraid to do the same.

“You'll accept?” asked Bond in return.

“If you accept.”

“Fine.”

“Fine!” 

“You're both ridiculous,” said Moneypenny from the doorway. “And you,” she added, pointing at Bond, “are not nearly as unpredictable as you think you are.”

Q transferred his glare at her. Why did everyone suddenly have access to his room?

“I'm going to tell Mallory that we're taking him up on his job offer,” the pointwoman continued. “And I'm going to negotiate the terms of our employment for all of us. Am I hearing any objections? No? I didn't think so.”

“I thought you were going shoe-shopping,” Q said, since Bond wasn't contributing anything to the conversation.

“And I will, after I've made sure you two idiots don't ruin this for all of us. Don't you dare move that PASIV, or I'll know and I'll find you.” Eve smiled at them, then turned around and gently closed the door behind her.

Q considered the pros and cons for a moment, then decided he didn't care and let himself flop back on the bed; he hadn't had such a draining day since he'd had to take over Professor Boothroyd's Year One Design and Creative Practice class.

“I hope you're happy,” Bond said.

“Ecstatic,” answered Q dryly, letting his eyes close. “Telling my dad I'm working for the Secret Service is going to be so much easier than explaining why I'm on the run from both the Interpol and the Chinese mafia.”

He heard Bond huff a quiet laugh and, after a moment, move; Q felt the mattress dip and decided against opening his eyes, not wanting to spook the man who'd just sat at the foot of the bed.

“You didn't have to stay,” Bond said after a moment. 

Q didn't bother to pretend not to know what Bond was talking about; he thought of the days waiting in that safe room, going out of his mind with worry and helplessness, and swallowed a cold knot of fear.

“You didn't have to go with M to the third level,” he answered, trying to sound non-judgemental.

“I couldn't let her there go alone.”

Finally, Q opened his eyes and turned his head to meet Bond's gaze, feeling curiously unafraid.

“I couldn't leave you there alone.”

Bond looked away and at the blank wall in front of the bed.

“I'm not...” and, uncharacteristically, he trailed off.

“You're not what?” Q sat up and turned to face Bond. “Not good for me? Not safe? Not... not worth it?” Bond’s immovable silence seemed confirmation enough. “Well, I’m sorry, James, but that’s my decision to make and not yours.”

“I should have known you’d be impossible even in this,” Bond said, sounding surprisingly fond even as he turned to glare at Q.

“I’m not the one who’s just sitting there like a big martyred lug- umph!”

Q still wanted to punch Bond, and he suspected the feeling would never go away completely. However, at the moment he was also amenable to letting Bond kiss him until Moneypenny got them to sign ironclad contracts with MI6 and there was no danger of their forger (and extractor) disappearing again. 

After all, Q had a number of promises to keep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you very much for following this fic! I hope you enjoyed reading it even half as much as I enjoyed writing it. 
> 
> I will now go and stand in a corner to convince myself I ought to stop writing crossovers.

**Author's Note:**

> Feedback is doted upon and fed expensive chocolate.


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